The Last Bass Outpost

I have a little story that involves one of those casings as well.
I already told it a Jules' place, but I figured it goes well with the other stories in this thread.


A while ago a I bought a casing plus mount ring too from Greatdealz on Ebay.
With the BaCHBird project in mind, I thought it might come in handy.

Almost at the same time Krishna (BostonGuitarRepair) told us how the inside of those sixties Thunderbird humbuckers look like. He told us there were MelodyMaker like pickups (with a bar magnet) inside.

So I bought two G3 single coils from the same guy on Ebay. The two G3 pickups will fit in perfectly if I cut off the middle lugs on both.
Haven't done anything final yet, though. I want to wait till the BaCHbird is here.


I did do some hobbying and wired them together as a humbucker.. Simply without any pots, just straight onto the jack plug.

Two single coils taped together with gaffertape.

- two orange wires from the groundplates of the coils to the bridge (ground)

- the white wire from one coil to the orange wire from the other coil.

-black wire to the ground of the jack plug
-red wires to the tip of the jack plug






I mounted this improvised G3 humbucker upside down over  the strings with some gaffertape and original screws as "stalks".
I used my (mahogany) BaCH Telebass for this experiment.
The pickup location; just about 1cm from the end of fretboard.





I must admit I'm not 100% convinced yet.
I miss the low frequencies.
Especially if you compare it to the soundsamples Jules put up on his site...
Although that may be caused by the improvised set up? Or maybe a poor connection to the jack (gaffer taped)?
Maybe I should add that I had to take the input volume down quite a bit on my recorder, because the output of this G3 combination is really very high!

Great read.
And what a great bassplayer! (I had never heard of him... )

Al had this bass, he would let me use his equipment and I ended up using this bass. I wish I could find one today. It was a Gibson Studio Les Paul Bass [Les Paul Triumph bass]. It had in and out phase switches and was a light colored mahogany finish. That was a good sounding bass. I loved the sound of that. That was the first Gibson bass I ever played at a gig with a group.

Someone please tell him that Les Paul Basses / Triumphs regularly pop up on Ebay

Hmmm me likey!

does it sound better?





Uwe's legal analysis: Of course it does, but - as usual - we're not allowed to speak freely about it as one of ze Moderätör's many mantras is: "Trussrod covers do not influence sound." But as long as we know and we believe it's alright.

PS: Sorry for scribbling into your post, Rob, I was trying to quote your post, but accidentally hit the modify button which allows me to change your post (and only yours, I had that custom made for me ...  ) and couldn't make it undone. Won't happen again.

Uwe

Hey WTF!!
Where's my compliment to Chris about those cool pics?

We should've known that the invasive character of our German moderatör would burst out eventually!
Next thing we know is all Entartete Bassgitarren will be deleted from this board...

I've been looking for 2.5K Triumph pots, Rob where'd you find them?  Actually, I think I'm still trying to figure out what taper the original ones were.  Do you know or did you just assume audio/log (some schematics show linear for some pots, log for others, and sometimes even a 3rd marking that I'm not familiar with - there are more than 2 pot tapers available).

Well, I got the info from Jules' pot database.
Lineair for Treble/Tone and I figured Logarithmic for Volume (which works perfect).
I found the pots at CTS. But I had to dig real deep. Actually I sent an email and got a very helpful guy answering my questions. Eventually he sent me the pots as a sample (= for free!). Now that's what I call good service.
BTW These official CTS pots came straight from the factory... in Taiwan.

I'd whine too if I'd won something and never got any. Hip Hop or not.

My Goodness

is that what they sell for these days?
I can buy 50 BaCHs for that kinda money LOL

superclean NRTbird II on Ebay

A guy on a Dutch Bass forum checked one out the other day.
He said it's horrible quality:

- there was a gap from 1 to 2 mm between fretboard and neck.
- wobbly pick guard
- brittle finish. if you scrape with your fingernails it chips right off.
- one of the machine head wouldn't stay in tune. It kept dropping from E to almost D.
- dull strings (straight out of the box from the factory).
- noisy pots
- bridge isn't straight

Haven't seen it in real life myself, but according to the above story I would say a No Go.