It's All About the Mods! (Show/Tell Your Modded Basses)

[Baloney Balderdash]

So this is the thread to post pictures of your modded basses and tell a bit about them.

 

 

I tend to mod all my instruments, if nothing else then at least visually, to personalize them.

 

I'll start with my current main instrument of choice, my just 28.6" scale 5 string Ibanez GSRM25 Mikro Bass, produced in January 2019 at the Cort factory in Indonesia, according the serial number, which I guess I really use more as a 5 string Bass VI type instrument than a traditional bass, though tuned in G standard tuning, that is 3 half steps above the lower 5 strings of a Bass VI, or 3 half steps above the upper 5 strings of a 6 string bass.

 

It features a Poplar body, a Maple neck and a Jatoba fretboard, 16.5mm string spacing, and 2 J pickups, perfectly leveled frets from stock, and an incredible amount of sustain.

 

Now to the mods I've done to it:

 

First thing I did was wire the 2 stock J pickups in series, as it just didn't sound right, like really hollow and ridiculously burby, it helped, but it still sounded odd, until I discovered that there was something wrong with the neck J pickup, which had an extremely weak magnetic field over the lower half of the strings (I suspect a broken bar magnet, as these are ceramic pickups, and might need to look into fixing it at some point), so I ended up disconnecting the neck J pickup and wiring the stock bridge J pickup directly to the output jack socket, and it actually sounds pretty damn amazing now.

 

Surprisingly little noise too, basically non to speak of, despite not having done any additional shielding, and despite running a single single coil pickup, which I credit to the fact that Ibanez used properly shielded wiring for the electronics and pickups, with the ground wire running as a braided shield all along the individually insulated hot wire.

 

Rest of the mods are purely visually: A silver lotus flower with a OM sign in the middle of it decal, a paint splatter figure, made with a mixture of a white marble effect and grey acrylic paint, applied with a tooth stick, on the upper horn, and a strip of red insulating tape (also known as electrical tape) applied to the top of each of the two J pickups, also removed one of the redundant pots, covering the hole with black insulating tape, and replaced the stock chrome pot knobs on the shafts of the two remaining pots with transparent/black PRS lampshade knobs, and finally I covered the brand/model name on the headstock with black insulating tape as well.

 

I also swapped the neck pocket screws out for slightly longer ones with Torx head slots, to ensure being able to screw them in tight without slipping or risk of stripping the slots.

 

 

Here it is, "Mr. Growley - The Noodlemancer", as I named it :

 

I don't have any pictures of it from when it was stock, but here's one I found on Google of s similar speced stock 5 string Ibanez GSRM25 Mikro Bass :

 

I do plan making a few more mods to this instrument:

 

Most certainly will soon replace the stock side mounted barrel type jack output socket, for a regular jack socket, which I will mount in one of the redundant pot holes, the one currently is covered by black tape.

 

I also ponder on maybe at some point replacing the bridge for 5 single black mono rail bridge pieces milled from solid brass. 

 

 

Edited April 25 by Baloney Balderdash