Ray34 Butchery

[Waddycall]

Not really a build but definitely my most adventurous mod to date. Just got the wiring to do now. Better not drink too much tonight!

 

Edited April 11, 2020 by Waddycall

[Jabba_the_gut]

Nice mod. Those Delano hybrid pickups are really nice - wiring is a bit more complicated than usual. I presume you are going to wire it the standard way i.e. humbucker is active, jazz pickups are passive, or do you have other plans?

Cheers

[paul_5]

Ooh, I’ve got something similar going on with my Jazz basses. I put a 3 way on/on/on switch to use either coil, or both in parallel to get the classic MM tone. Nice job on the routing by the way.

[Waddycall]

10 hours ago, Jabba_the_gut said:

Nice mod. Those Delano hybrid pickups are really nice - wiring is a bit more complicated than usual. I presume you are going to wire it the standard way i.e. humbucker is active, jazz pickups are passive, or do you have other plans?

Cheers

Got to admit I’m not looking forward to wiring this up! I’ve got a Sonar 2 pre which I think will just fit in the bottom of the cavity. It’s going to be a tight squeeze. Otherwise it’ll need more butchery. I’m going with the schematic below which I think is the standard way of wiring these up. Looking forward to trying this out! 

[songofthewind]

Very smart work on a very smart mod.

What do you do to pan between pickups? I am a dimwit.

[songofthewind]

Oops, sorry, I see the balance pot in the diagram. Which looks very clear.

[Waddycall]

7 hours ago, songofthewind said:

Oops, sorry, I see the balance pot in the diagram. Which looks very clear.

Yep, pickup pan control instead of two volumes.

[Waddycall]

Well, I’m going to quit before I ruin this today. I’ve got the components mounted on the control plate and have soldered a few connections. Unfortunately my soldering iron tip has seen better days as has my eye sight for detailed work. I think I need to sort out my soldering equipment and get a magnifier before I carry on with this!

[Waddycall]

All done! Bit of a nightmare doing the wiring. Probably the fiddliest thing I’ve ever done! Had a couple of issues including wiring the jack socket up the wrong way round and I also managed to overheat the treble pot with my dodgy soldering iron. Once I moved to the garage and kept the tip super clean with a wire brush on my pillar drill it got a bit easier! I think I’ll order a spare treble pot. Contact cleaner has got it working ok but id rather be safe than sorry.

after a quick set up it’s sounding as I’d hoped. Really nice to get some passive jazz tones out of my ray! The Ray pickup sounds pretty authentic to my ears too. I’ll see if I can post some recordings later.

 

[Mykesbass]

Interesting pickups. Great work. Oh, and nice vintage sewing machine 😎

[Dov65]

I like that a lot bud, really well done 👍

[songofthewind]

That looks super nice. Would love to hear some sound clips.

[Maude]

Nice neat work, it looks great. 

[Waddycall]

Thanks a lot for the nice words chaps. I'm really pleased with this. Its made it into a really versatile bass. In my hands it was a bit too limited before but I really like everything about this bass now.

Here's some dodgy slap playing for you to sample. It cycles through the following settings and changes every four bars when there's a cymbal crash. I fumbled around in real time to make the changes so was quite limited to what I could fiddle with. The active settings have a slight treble and bass boost and passive has the tone wide open. Its straight through my interface to Cubase with no tweaking.

In active the bridge pickup is in MM mode and when passive its in J mode.

1. Active Bridge (MM)

2. Active Centre (Bridge MM and J Neck)

3. Active J Neck (bit harsh!)

4. Passive J Neck

5. Passive Centre (Bridge J and J Neck)

6. Passive bridge (J)

Cheers,

Pete

[songofthewind]

Sounds punchy on all settings. J neck soloed maybe not so much, but all tasty.

Good work! Colour me jealous.