Hacking my P Bass into a P-rick.

[Alanko]

I've been working from home for 28 weeks now, and starting to hatch bad ideas.

My P Bass has sort of 'split in two'. The neck on it is now on my Jazz Bass, and I replaced the body with a white P Bass body.... so that leaves this sunburst body looking for a purpose in life:



I've been messing around with neck pickups in basses for years. I've chopped up a fair few basses to add extra pickups. My plan is to install a Roswell-branded mini humbucker in the neck position on this P Bass.



They've cheekily made it look just like a Rickenbacker Toaster pickup. I already have one of these pickups in my 4003 and it sounds pretty good! Darker than a normal Rick pickup, but in such a tonal 'dead zone' this isn't really a problem. It delivers lots of low end.

I'm sticking one of these in the bridge position:



Its a Roswell 'QPA' pickup, which looks like a SD Quarter Pounder copy, with chunky alnico poles.

I'm going to wire it like a Jazz Bass, with three controls. I will use a 4.7 nF capacitor as a treble bleed on the bridge pickup volume control. This means that if I roll back the volume to 8 I should get a tone that is like the 'vintage' setting on a 4003 bass.

I will update this thread with photos when I get round to doing anything.

[Alanko]

So for once I actually did exactly what I said I would do.



I carved out my P Bass body and then shielded liberally with copper tape.

This gave me enough room to implement this:



And this is what it sounds like:

[Dave W]

That came out nice! 

[OldManC]

Very nice!

[amptech]

Not bad! Now put a bar bridge on it and you're done

[Basvarken]

Nice.
A little bit Sheehan-esque.

[morrow]

Nice , but there should be a big gaping hole around the bridge pickup .

[gearHed289]

That looks great. Every P bass could use a neck pickup.   

[BTL]

That looks and sounds great!

[Rob]

Fender should use that!

[Alanko]

Nice , but there should be a big gaping hole around the bridge pickup .

Time to fire up the Forstner bits!


There is a certain oomph you get from a true neck pickup that you can't really fake with cunning EQ'ing, shelving etc.

[Highlander]

 

[clankenstein]

Very Cool. Lots of useable tones on tap!

[slinkp]

Oh I like that. What are the settings on the different parts of the video? Sounds like the pickups combine pretty well!

[slinkp]

Looks like you also changed the bridge. And bought a maple neck for it?