The Last Bass Outpost

I've noticed that Fender have been selling both US and Mexican bodies and necks for some time. Oddly they have a line of roasted maple necks that seem to be exclusively available as aftermarket parts. I know that buying new parts is probably terrible value for money overall, but I'm going ahead anyway.

I'm always in the market for a Jazz Bass, but find it hard to bond to them. I'm giving it another shot, and I will document the process here.

As a rule of thumb I buy Mexican Fender basses second hand, and usually strip out the stock pickups and wiring and replace where necessary. I also tend to level, crown and polish the frets as well. However Covid-19 seems to have reduced the pool of available instruments, so I can't snaffle up a used bass at the moment. Beyond this, my preference is for Mexican basses built during the era they introduced the black headstock decal (maybe 2010s?) up until they revised the lineup as the 'Player Series'. In terms of the used market people tend to want the same money for a dinged up 1990s corner-cutter Mex bass as they do for a mint 2019 bass with the plastic film on the pickguard. There is no consistency in the price of used MIM Fender basses in my experience, and I'm shooting for a fairly small niche where I think they were at their best.

With all of this in mind, I've just bought a black Jazz body and maple Jazz neck online. I have most of the other bits I need already. Watch this space!

This was a birthday present for myself!

I've been on the hunt for something with a mudbucker down at the end of the neck for a while. My 4003 and Starfire both have true neck pickups, but neither has a hot, punchy pickup in that spot. I was looking at basses to modify, when I stumbled up on this! Its red, SG-shaped and doesn't need any routing or hacking about.



I'd previously been checking out a used, and abused, longscale Epiphone EB-3, but I didn't like the block inlays or the visual impression of a small SG body on the end of a long neck. Plus, the neck angle wasn't quite right as the strings were tickling the bridge pickup, which was about as low as it would go in its trim ring.

From some Googling, it seems that Tokai make/made a few EB-3 copies. One was a bolt-on necked bass. One had a weirdly short pickguard. One had a wider knob spacing like an early EB-3. I'm not sure what model this is, but it has a set neck and the pickguard is almost the right shape. Unfortunately the pickguard isn't quite flat on the top of the bass, but I plan to cut another with a 30 degree bevel.

Just to clarify, this isn't an old 'lawsuit' instrument but something built in the last few years, most probably in China. I think it shares a lot of DNA with Epiphone EB-0 basses.





Headstock has a cheeky open-book shape and the tuners have nice small paddles, rather than the huge cloverleafs that make some EB-0/SG/EB-3 basses look a bit silly. I have some Wilkinson tuners of the same design if I need to upgrade.




The pickups are a mixed bag. The 'mudbucker' is similar to an Epiphone EB-0 pickup I had for a while. Specifically it measures 1.2 k ohms on the multimeter, as some Epiphone EB-0 pickups do. Tonally it is a dull pickup with low output but very little treble as well. I will probably replace this with an Artec sidewider.

The bridge pickup is like a Firebird/minibucker pickup and has a bit more snap to it. It meters out at 5.6 k ohm, which is still a bit low for a humbucker. It is also very slightly microphonic and slightly more susceptible to interference. It is mounted to a low, flat trim ring. I will probably swap this out with a Gotoh/All Parts repro EB-3 bridge pickup.


Tokai fitted 34'' roundwounds to this bass and simply chopped them down to fit. This makes the strings sloppy, buzzy and very uneven. I will probably go with some sort of black tapewound strings for maximum British Invasion tones.


As for the wiring, the bass is currently configured like an SG guitar. Each volume acts as a master in the middle setting. I'm planning to replace the pickup switch with a 6-way varitone control, using the primary of a small transformer to act as a choke. I plan to wire the bridge pickup with a treble bleed (4.7 nF cap with no resistor in series). The neck pickup tone control is getting swapped for two schottky diodes in parallel, back to back.

I've been listening to the band Curved Air a lot recently. Admittedly I don't like the following song, but I have been trying to work out what the bass is!



To get around the dodgy visuals, I inverted the colours.




It looks a bit like an EB-3, only with two identical single coils, a two-piece bridge, and a split diamond headstock inlay. I don't think it is a Gibson. It looks like a Greco headstock, but I can't tie it to any of their models. It also says 'Framus' to me, but again I can't pin it down to a specific model.

A nice EB-2. Pretty much factory fresh.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/253819638860?ul_noapp=true

A properly ventilated mudbucker.

I enjoy guitar archaeology. I like seeing a guitar and trying to work out what has happened with it, and what needs to be done to it.

As per my NBD thread I picked up a used but not abused Dearmond Starfire at the weekend. If I bought it from Reverb it would probably be called a 'Barn Find' instrument. The guy who sold it to me bought it new, used it in a funk band, and then hid it in the attic for years as he moved back to 34'' instruments. As such it is clean, but its time in storage has introduced some issues.


The bass has one scratch in the top which I plan to infill with superglue, level and polish out. The clear coat on this is poly, which is pretty thick. This means I should be able to level, blend and polish everything in. I'm guessing a screwdriver or other tool slipped over the surface of the instrument near the selector switch. Oops!

Beyond that it needs a new wiring harness, a fret dressing, and a general clean and polish. Some of the chrome work on the bridge pickup is pitted, so I can only polish what is there to be polished! The metal work is dull and smeary, but luckily none of it is scratched. The odd thing is that the black saddle adjuster screws and springs have an odd white bloom on them. It is a bit like a superglue bloom, or the result of some old plastic off-gassing. I can't find the source of this, but it has ruined the black finish on the screws.

The electronics are the weak link in the chain. I've seen this before on Korean instruments; you get amazing build quality then totally average electronics. The 3-way swith is one of those closed in box-type switches. Once they go dead they stay dead. The pots are 500k Cor-tek branded units. Nothing special, and a bit to on/off for me to bother saving them. As per some Epiphones and the like, they used a kilometer of wiring where a meter would do. There is a lot of slack in the wires in this bass.

The frets are green, and have a bit of roundwound chew as well. The bass came with astonishingly dead, low tension rounds with red silks. Maybe Rotosounds?

Before pics:




Green frets and ham.

This bass might already be known in these circles. Anyway, I follow a page called 'Reptile Dentistry' that documents some of the cruder guitar modifications that surface on the net.

Today they posted these images!





What is there not to like?

According to the news this morning, Can bassist Holger Czukay has passed away.



RIP Holger.

I've found somebody selling some circa 2008 Gibson Thunderbird pickups. I'm not entirely happy with the plugged-in tone of my MIM Jazz bass. I like the girth and grind of a Thunderbird, and I love the feel and unplugged tone of my MIM Jazz bass.

A simple question really, is it worth getting my Jazz routed for T-bird pickups? I'm not after that chromed out look or anything retro like that, simply a bit more meat and muscle to my Jazz bass, while retaining the feel of it.