Obrienp

The Talman makes a great modification platform. The bridge (actually the OEM is not bad) is 7 screw mounting (on my 5 string) but looks as though modern Fender 5 screw fit will do; the machine heads are big old vintage style, so lots of choices; pickups may be a bit of an issue on the 5, if you don’t want to route, as the jazz is the same size as a four string; OEM nobs are horrible but easily replaced; the pots are tiny but seem to work OK. Fretwork, etc was fine on mine. Based on my 5 string, the only mod I really needed to make was to shield the cavities because it hummed a lot out of the box. The OEM P pickup isn’t bad to my ears and I only use the jazz to add some tonal colour to the P. I did more mods but IMO you need to be careful not to spend too much, as you will never recover it if you decide to sell.

Well, the GAS got the better of me, so I have ordered one in Lake Placid Blue from the Bass Gallery. The wait starts now and I think my victim is going to be my Ibanez EHB1000S. I will be sad to see it go but one in one out is the rule ☹️.

I know what you mean about setting your tone and leaving it there. I don’t need anything much more than a P Bass for the kind of music I am playing at the moment. I was thinking of using this with the blues band I play in, so really just a couple of traditional tonal variations are fine. If I can call those up using preset buttons and some amp tweaking, so much the better. I certainly don’t need a club like traditional P Bass neck: I have smallish hands and arthritis in my left thumb. Consequently, I have had to go short scale recently to be able keep playing. The Acinonyx sounds as though it would be perfect in the circumstances and the lightweight would help with a 3 hour gig we have coming up. Unfortunately, I don’t think I will be able to get hold of one before that and my one in one out policy means I’ve got to select a victim to be culled: difficult!

Many thanks for that detailed feedback. I was reading reviews on the Talkbass forum yesterday and the GAS is building to irresistible levels! It’s good to get a UK perspective. It sounds like the perfect bass for me. I don’t need a huge range of tones, just two or three good ones that I can call on easily and the push buttons sound like the perfect solution for that. The other requirement is for a bass that sits well in the mix.

I am hoping to revive this thread. I note that quite a few BassChat folks have bought these but I also note that there have been quite a few sold on here too. I hear nothing bad about it in the various reviews available online but then they don’t use it long term. It would be great to hear what the long term experience is from any owners out there. Is it something that you can use as your only bass at a gig, or do you find yourself just using it to get a particular sound on a couple of songs in a set? Is it a one trick pony, or an all rounder? How does it hold up to gigging, especially those push buttons? What about the narrow nut and string spacing: too cramped, or a joy to play? Thanks in advance for any insights. I am fighting serious GAS, tempered by the fact that you can only pre-order at the moment (definitely a good thing for my credit card bill).

Wow, dmc79 lots to answer there and some of it is a bit subjective, so a lot of this IMO. Yes, the 4 fret stretch is easier. One of the bands I play in is a blues band that does a lot of up tempo stuff, with some rock and roll thrown in for good measure (so lots of 4 fret stretches). A combination of age related issues and small hands was combining to make it real murder on my big boy ‘51 Precision (copy): by the second set I was finding it physically impossible to keep my speed up and my hand would literally cramp up. Moving to a 30” scale has made it so much easier. I can now do a 2 set gig and keep my speed up without discomfort. Fret 1 to fret 4 on my 30” basses is about 11.5 cm/4.5”. Weight: shorties do tend to be lighter but there are some notable exceptions, so it is worth checking before pulling the trigger. The Reverend Watt Plower is made of lead according to some folks and some Chowny basses were a bit weighty but they say they are addressing that now they have moved to UK manufacture. Generally they are lighter, so less shoulder and back strain on prolonged gigs. A drawback that comes with diminished size and weight can be neck-dive but that can be countered with a grippy strap and/or lightweight tuners. Not all shorties suffer: my Ibanez EHB1000S is perfectly balanced but it is far from your Fender aesthetic. I have noticed that there are quite a few slab bodied shorties: e.g. Fender Mustang, Gretsch Junior Jet, etc. it’s a matter of taste but I find the lack of an arm contour causes forearm pain playing standing up for protracted periods. This isn’t unique to shorties of course. Strings: I think it is fair to say there isn’t the same huge choice that you get for standard bass and that can reflect in a price premium. Most of the big manufacturers do rounds and flats for 30 and 32” scale basses. Finding one that suits your Fender P Bass preference: well it depends on what you want to spend. There is actually a much wider range of short scale basses than a perusal of the usual online shops would lead you to believe. If you have Fender Standard/Performer range money both Sandberg and Maruszczyk do short and medium scale versions of their P Models (and Jazz). Maruszczyk seem to do every colour combination you could think of. If you really can’t find what you want, getting a custom bass made is not as expensive as you might think. I had a custom P/J shorty made on a ‘51/54 P Bass theme for the same money as the Fender Performer Mustang by Tony Edwards Guitars and I am sure other luthiers will do similar. There is a thread on the short scale Stingray somewhere on this forum.

Would a Bronco be better from that respect? I found the neck pretty thin on mine. One that would really fit the bill from the neck size/width perspective is the Nordstrand Acinonyx but probably above budget. Obviously a different aesthetic as well.

30” = short scale in my book. 32” = medium. I noticed on the Chowny thread that their CHB models are approx 31” and 33” , which they call short and medium respectively, so I guess it is open to interpretation. Does that make basses in the 28” and a bit range micro scale?

Yep; if I hadn’t looked at this thread I would be GAS free at the moment. You got me on lighter weight but that burst is incredible!

I can see why you are asking, even the Hofner website doesn’t give much detail on them. The Bass Direct site gives the best info I could find. This is for the Ignition version for instance: https://www.bassdirect.co.uk/bass_guitar_specialists/Hofner_Igintion_Violin_Limited_Edition.html. 42mm at the nut to 50mm at the 12th fret is pretty narrow IMO. By comparison my Ibanez EHB 1000S shorty is 42mm to 58mm. You can get the Ignition a lot cheaper if you shop around a bit: under £300.

Bit confused by exactly what is happening at Chowny. Lots of positive messaging on here, other forums and Facebook but the website is saying 8-10 weeks wait for CHB-1 and talking about the 2018 model. Is it just that the website has not been updated for 4 years?

Well, it sounds super quiet on idle….now. The push/pull pot didn’t arrive until Saturday morning and I wired it up in a hurry so I could catch the 6 Nations matches live. Reassembled, I found the volume control was working backwards and it was buzzing like hell. A more measured dismantle and rewire on Sunday morning fixed both issues. It is now really quiet, even with the jazz on solo and more surprisingly, with the pickups in series mode. That is without touching the strings too. I also think the jazz sounds a bit stronger than before but that might be wishful thinking. It turned out that the new Fender high mass bridge wasn’t making contact with the earth wire in its standard position, so I extended it (without insulation) to one of the mounting screw holes and put some copper tape over it for good measure. I must have used about a meter of cloth covered wire (I am old school) to earth everything, top and bottom of the pots and onto the shielding tape in every cavity. I can recommend Northwest Guitars cloth covered wire, which I tried for the first time. It may be a bit more expensive than other sources but it is pre-tinned, so really easy to solder. All the controls I used were Alpha but I was a little disappointed that the push/pull and blend controls had mini pots, whereas the tone is a full sized pot (like a CTS). This is not clear when you order them but I guess if they had full sized pots on top, they might be too bulky. They seem to work very well and the blend has a centre detent. I also liked the tag on the bottom of the push/pull that means you don’t have to try to solder the earth wires onto the side of the pot. In fact, it took a female spade connector, which made it easy to bring together multiple ground wires. That’s the end of upgrades for now, I hope. Now to gig it!

I put a full split P in mine and it looked fine. There is a company on eBay that do custom pickguards and they did one for me cut for the split P. You will have to do a little routing to fit it in but not a huge amount. I did mine with a couple of sharp chisels. I did consider putting a ‘51 pickup in it, as I have one spare from a project I did. The trouble is the string spacing is all wrong: a proper ‘51 P pickup expects wide spacing (they are 20mm string to string at the bridge). With a split P you can move the two pickups to overlap more and compensate for the narrower Bronco string spacing. Also ‘51s are pretty much a one trick pony too. IMO a split P is more versatile. It’s a matter of taste though, you might like the ‘51 if you can find one with the pole pieces close enough together for the Bronco string spacing.

At the risk of making people really ticked off with this thread, I think I may have sussed why that jazz pickup is so noisy on the TMB35, at least if mine is typical. This is what it looks like inside. No shielding at all in the jazz cavity but strangely they chose to paint the cavity for the precision with graphite paint (pretty sloppy job) and even earthed the cavity (I had removed the earth wire before taking the pic). You would think, if they were only going to shield one cavity, it would have been the one for the jazz pickup! The second photograph is my “after” state with copper shielding in place. I will run an earth wire from each pickup up cavity to a central ground. I have also installed the Fender high mass bridge unit. I had to drill new mount holes but fortunately there was no overlap with the existing ones, so it should be firmly anchored despite only having 4 screws. The next job is to wire up the push/pull, blend and tone potentiometers, and a new output jack.

I’ll second that. I have used a 4 way Tele switch to do just that. The added wrinkle is that the neck pickup is a humbucker and middle pickup single coil, so the series position creates a 3 coil pickup, which sounds huge but it is a bit noisy. I also have a separate coil tap switch for the humbucker.

A lot of people on this forum have done that but it is an expensive option. Maybe not so much if you are buying in $ but this side of the pond you are looking at £300 for that size Aguilars and which ones? Do you stick with the DCB type or go for something that sounds single coil like the Super Splits.

Exactly my thoughts. I bet it sounds incredible but my simple rule is not to spend more on upgrading components than the bass cost originally. I broke that rule recently on a Bronco and got taught a lesson when I came to sell it. I can see it is tempting with the TMB35 because I can’t think of another decent short scale 5 string for less than £1,000. It might be argued that spending £400, or so on upgrading the main components (bridge, pickups, machine heads, electrics) leaves you with a fantastic bass that still cost you less than the alternatives. Anyway, with the way string prices are going, it might be impossible to honour my rule when a string change is needed! I am still going to try though.

No. I didn’t explain it very well. Fingers crossed that it is going to work OK!

I should probably let this go but I was talking about 250k and 500k potentiometers, rather than caps. The cap I would be using would be 47nf with a 250K pot.

I might look again at my schematic design but I was going to do the blend first and then go to the push/pull but the switch will shut off one pickup’s hot lead to the blend when in series; it sends it to the ground of the next pickup in series. I will definitely have to shield to keep the noise down when in series. I might be wrong but I think the 250K cuts more top than the 500K, which is why 500K is recommended for humbuckers. Anyway, it looks as though I am going to find out for certain as I ordered 250Ks. Certainly my experience with a project bass, that has a mudbucker and a ‘51 P in it, is that the single coil P going into the 500K pots and .22 cap solo was much too bright (and loud) but 250Ks and .47 cap made the mudbucker (actually it is a DiMarzio 145) too muddy. I got round this by wiring a 500k resistor in parallel with the P’s hot lead: it makes the 500K pot look like a 250 to the ‘51 pickup, so it takes some of the top end and signal off. I can’t get my head round what happens when the two pickups are switched to series. They do sound massive but as you say quite noisy, despite tons of copper tape shielding. By the way, I am no electronics expert, I just got all this off the web and I am probably not using the correct technical language, so I am probably talking a load of bllx. The Stewmac and Fralin websites are really helpful for this sort of stuff. I now wish I had paid more attention during O Level Physics!

I meant switching the 2 pickups between parallel and series. I tried parallel/series switching between the two parts of a split P (and a 4 wire 51) and I didn’t think it added much but maybe I am not very attentive to nuisances in tone. Yes, you are are right, when I switch them to series the blend won’t function. It will effectively be one big pickup with volume and tone controls. Actually thinking about that, I am now wondering what value pots and capacitor I should be using. I have ordered 250s but maybe I should go for 500s and wire resistors in parallel to the pickups’ hot leads for when they are needing to see 250. I guess 250s are going to clip off some of the top end, so maybe that is not such a bad thing for a bass, as long as it doesn’t make it sound muddy. I always think Ibanez basses sound a tadge bright anyway.