Barend-
Thanks for the updated picture and the great sound clip! I posted your clip here:
Well... I have an idea of what is going on now. That's the good news, the bad news is that it is probably not the answer you want to hear. I think your bass is "bypassed", and my hypothesis as to why your bass is just ever so slightly "bassier" than mine is difference in the impedance of your mudbucker compared to mine.
I could not find
any discrepancies in looking at your wiring. There are a couple places I can't see (under the resistor and cap over the varitone, for example) but in those places, the wires going in seem to have the right trajectories. It is probably a safe bet all is OK under there... and your choke is *definitely* out of the circuit, with that green wire loose.
My theory is this - that your neck pickup is wound slightly hotter than mine, thus producing a slightly "boomier" tone. I can hear the upper mids and highs in your sound - which I don't think would be there if you wired it back stock. My neck pickup measures 29K, which is on the lower side for the behemoth mudbucker. I bet if you measured your pickup, it might fall into the low 30K range, which seems common for these.
You could always validate this theory by temporarily hooking that green wire back up to the switch lug from which it came (even without soldering it) just to hear the difference first hand. It may be, with that non-original blue/green bypass wire in place that we talked about earlier, that there just wasn't much filtering going on in position one to begin with! ... and the difference after the mod wasn't as drastic as it was on mine. It would be very interesting to hear the effects side-by-side if you did end up trying this.
If any other readers are still here after all this troubleshooting , please chime in with your thoughts too! Listen to these clips to compare the sounds.
Here again is my bass, with
1) original position 1, and
2) modified/bypassed position 1:
...and this is Barend's
modified/bypassed position 1:
I think Barend's sample sounds more like my second "modified/bypassed" sample (with the upper mids and highs), but with ever so slightly more bass -like a hotter mudbucker might yield. What do you think??