Bass upgrade stories - got a bass that you love, but gave a little something extra to?

[PaulThePlug]

14 minutes ago, Rexel Matador said:

Interesting! I was just trying to decide what value tone cap to put in the bass I'm building. It never occurred to me I could have them all!

I've got an Artec QTP in my two SR Modders... £13

http://www.artecsound.com/pickups/electronics/qdd

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403241742777

[BigRedX]

I've done it twice to keep a bass playable and twice in the hope of some improvement.

 

 

Keeping the bass playable:

 

My first bass was second-hand 60s Burns Sonic which had already been heavily modified by a previous owner. My changes were partly to remove the unwanted modifications - there was an extra socket and two controls added to scratch plate which were obviously for controlling some piece of external gear, but of no use to me - and to keep the bass playable as both the original machine heads and the bridge were on their last legs. The bridge was especially problematic as due the design of the bass, the saddles needed to be much higher than possible with the standard BBOT system. I went through three different bridges before settling on a modified 8-string bridge for the string spacing fitted to a 10mm thick slab of mahogany for the height. I also replaced the very scratchy controls, although this wasn't really essential as I never touched any of them - by far the best sound was with the volume and tone controls on full and both pickups on which wired them in series due to the nature of the switch used.

 

I also had a Hondo Alien which is a copy of Kramer's The Duke. The Schaller look-alike machine heads and bridge were very low quality and there therefore replaced with the real components.

 

 

Trying to make an improvement:

 

I had joined a band that suited fretless bass and had bought a defretted Wesley Acrylic bass for £60 off eBay to see how I got on. Having decided that I could get on with fretless bass I was looking for something better than the Wesley and the Squier VMF Jazz was getting good reviews. I tried on in one of the local instrument retailers and liked it. Unfortunately when I get it home and compared with my other basses the output was very weedy compared with everything else I owned and very lacking in low mids compared with the Wesley. I went through all the standard Fender modifications - Badass bridge, J-Retro Pre-amp but while both were an improvement, it still wan't right. I was contemplating replacing the pickups with some Bartolinis when a Pedulla Buzz came up for sale at a price I couldn't ignore, and Squier was returned to it's original condition and sold.

 

My first 5-string was a Washburn B-105. I thought I'd improve it by replacing the stock pickups and preamp with an EMG system. It made absolutely no difference to the sound at all.

 

Based on all of this I no longer bother with upgrades and modifications to my guitars or basses. If they are not doing what I want I'll sell them and buy something that does. Most of the time the combination of features I want means a custom build is generally better and less hassle.

[neepheid]

1 hour ago, andruca said:

Then I also added an "armrest" to play more comfy when seated. Yes, it's crappy foamy rubber cornering, the kind you put on furniture edges/corners when you have little kids. Comfy a/f to play seated now.

 

Interesting mod.  For my semi-hollow/hollow thinline basses, I opted to mod myself rather than the bass - with an elasticated wrist sweatband pulled up my arm to where the contact point is.

 

[andruca]

1 hour ago, Rexel Matador said:

Interesting! I was just trying to decide what value tone cap to put in the bass I'm building. It never occurred to me I could have them all!

That was only because I already had the hole in there. Otherwise I would've gone with a single 22nF cap (my fave value for passive tone).

[soulstar89]

On 09/10/2023 at 17:19, Linus27 said:

So, by all accounts, I've ended up modding all my basses, not from boredom but just because I can never get what I want.

 

So my oldest and most loved bass is a 1986 ESP 400 Series Jazz Bass that I bought from new in 1987. The best bass I have ever owned and I found out, came from the same factory that Fender Japan basses were made. It probably accounts for why Fender parts are interchangeable and has exactly the same headstock etc. Anyway, a year or two after owning it from new, I had a set of Bartolini's fitted which transformed the bass. I then about 12 years ago, had Jon Shuker make an amazing ebony fretless neck for it which is where it has remained. Its got 36 years of battle scares but its still amazing and gets played to this day.

 

Next is my Fender FSR 70's Mexican Precision that I bought new is 2018. Being a lover of 70's natural Fender Precision's and a huge Sting fan, I got Jon Shuker to make a high gloss fretless maple neck which again is where it has stayed and it has turned out to be the best sounding bass for recording.

 

Next is my Fender Japan 62RI Precision. An absolutely lovey bass to play but I felt there was more on offer if I changed the pickups. So as my Fender FSR 70's Precision as above came with Fender 62 Custom Shop pickups and sounded so good, I had a set of them fitted to it along with new pots and it sounds fabulous. I also changed the pickguard from Tort to Black.

 

 

 

wow!  Beautiful basses. Nice photos also. 

[Krysbass]

I've upgraded to Gotoh tuning heads on all my basses, and went for the lightweight versions on my Spector ReBop 5 and my '84 Westone Thunder III. 

 

After owning the Westone from new, I also replaced the original pickups and electronics in that bass with Bartolini pickups and 3-band eq.   I did that in 2018 to give more modern functionality for a predominantly 80s themed band I had going at the time, as the original controls were rather idiosyncratic and hard to get some tones out of.   Since doing those mods, I've been playing the Westone more than my other 4 basses put together. 

[Acebassmusic]

I've modded a number of basses over the years sometimes for aesthetic reasons and sometimes to "upgrade".

 

The first one I did was when I was about 17. I had bought myself a brand new Squire jazz in white poly about a year beforehand but was obsessed with the look of neck through wood basses and wanted to try and emulate one. In my wisdom what did I decide to do? Yep, break out the nitromors / heat gun / sandpaper and take it back to wood. Part 2 of the plan required me to mask off the centre section of the bass so I could stain it to look like my desired neck throughs. Did it end up looking like a prized Ken Smith.....er not quite! 🤣 I'd underestimated the ability of stain to leach into the other areas of the wood.  No photos have survived thank goodness.

 

Did I learn my lesson and decline to modify basses after this first calamatous excursion?....nah! Over the years that followed I've refinished a JD calibas, replaced several bridges and hardware with more functional ones and changed out several pickup / preamp combinations. All much more successfuly I might add. 😁

 

Apart from installing a updated preamp into my Overwater which was a simple swap out, the last major modification I did was to my Roscoe. It'd had several owners so at some point the original Bartolini pre had been removed, an hole drilled in the body for a mid-control and the pre swapped out for something else. This setup wasn't working correctly so the last owner had taken it into a shop to get it changed out to an Audere, all now working tickety-boo. 👍 I quite happily bought the bass and played it for a number of months but was never quite happy with the Audere sound and as I had a Sadowsky preamp going spare.....Only problem was it was a 4 knob pre going into a 5 hole body. The solution was to wire the pickups to a double DPDT switch so I could fill the 5th hole and get parallel / single / series options.

 

Reworking the electrics / pre / wiring was the easy bit. Once I got into the cavity and emptied out the old pre it was aparent the wood had been "modified" as well as a heavy coating of shielding paint. This was no recent change as there was evidence of years of tinkering in there. There was only one thing for me to do, break out the Dremmel to remove the shielding and router to flatten the cavity for the pots. Rather nervously and VERY carefully I spent hours Dremmeling (?) the shielding off and routing small amounts away. Eventually I got it so that all the pots and switches would now fix flat and copper shielding would adhere successfully. I've added a couple of before / after photos showing the controls and the cavity. The sound from the bass is now what I was looking for with the flexibility of the DPDT switch added in 👍

 

Controls before and after:

 

Control cavity before and after:

 

 

 

[Owen]

Positive and negative.

 

I had a bass modified to give the EMG circuit 18v power instead of the standard 9v. There was absolutely negligible difference.

 

Plumbing Bongo pickups and preamp into a Stingray. Wowzers!

[andruca]

43 minutes ago, Owen said:

Positive and negative.

 

I had a bass modified to give the EMG circuit 18v power instead of the standard 9v. There was absolutely negligible difference.

 

Plumbing Bongo pickups and preamp into a Stingray. Wowzers!

 

There should be no difference in fact. Just higher headroom => lower distortion, which is not an issue if your pickups' gain don't clip the onboard preamp in the first place. Some claim a cleaner/richer tone, that's exactly how lack of distortion sounds to me. Some poorly designed/fitted onboards do benefit from the 18V upgrade. Most if not all are designed to work with a wide power supply range, so manufacturers/builders/upgraders decide whether to prescribe 9 or 18V based on the output gain of their pickups of choice. I know a couple examples of instruments with onboard preamps clipping from factory. One is most entry level Sterling By Musicmans. You don't even have to boost anything to get them to distort (in an ugly non-musical way), you're out of headroom just by digging in. The other is the Q-mix some Yamaha BBs used to come equipped with. Slightly boosting anything would make mine (2 BB-615s I owned) fart. They stopped distorting when fed 18V (the preamp still sucked, ended up swapping both for ~20€ 3-band Artecs, WAY better, and OK at 9V). So. If your EMGs were already clean sounding the gain might perfectly be, as you've experienced, close to none.

Edited October 10, 2023 by andruca

[Owen]

8 minutes ago, andruca said:

 

There should be no difference in fact. Just higher headroom => lower distortion, which is not an issue if your pickups' gain don't clip the onboard preamp in the first place. Some claim a cleaner/richer tone, that's exactly how lack of distortion sounds to me. Some poorly designed/fitted onboards do benefit from the 18V upgrade. Most if not all are designed to work with a wide power supply range, so manufacturers/builders/upgraders decide whether to prescribe 9 or 18V based on the output gain of their pickups of choice. I know a couple examples of instruments with onboard preamps clipping from factory. One is most entry level Sterling By Musicmans. You don't even have to boost anything to get them to distort (in an ugly non-musical way), you're out of headroom just by digging in. The other is the Q-mix some Yamaha BBs used to come equipped with. Slightly boosting anything would make mine (2 BB-615s I owned) fart. They stopped distorting when fed 18V (the preamp still sucked, ended up swapping both for ~20€ 3-band Artecs, WAY better, and OK at 9V). So. If your EMGs were already clean sounding the gain might perfectly be, as you've experienced, close to none.

It was an expensive lesson.

[LukeFRC]

On 09/10/2023 at 20:22, TheGreek said:

I bought a Kawai F2b which had a defective bridge pickup, which had a lower output. 

I really should have left it alone - tbh I could have lived with the lower output,  especially as I'm predominantly playing 5ers now.

Changing the pickups turned out to be a nightmare  - I ordered a set of custom pickups which really were characterless and had to go back.

Replaced these with a set of active Wilkinsons which are "fine" but not as punchy as the originals. 

The whole process took far longer than it should have and I'm not convinced that I've upgraded the electronics - if I was playing 4s I'd probably be thinking about a good quality preamp but since I'm not I'll leave it for the next owner to do if I sell what is an amazing bass. 

Images below are of the original pickups. 

 

love those knobs. 
Kawai is on my list to try sometime, though I know the pickups are pretty much impossible to replace when they go

[LukeFRC]

I had a beat up Lakland 55-94 which has a lovely fat tone that the eq wasn't doing anything for - boosting mids was too boomy, cutting seemed to kill the whole bass.
But there is a way, and their is a master - and his name is John East

and his Uni pre is lovely. 
 

Now I have read online that the lakland on it's bridge pickup doesn't sound the same as a stingray. And I have measured and compensated for the scale lengths and found that yes, it is not in Leo Fenders 70's sweet spot... 
But control over bass and treble boost frequencies, and A-B ing it against a borrowed 1976 Stingray got it pretty close

[Baloney Balderdash]

Back in April 2011 I bought an Ibanez GSRM20 Mikro Bass, and I fell in love with how it played right from the start, perfectly leveled frets and all, right from the factory. 

 

I wasn't however sold on how the cheap stock pickups sounded, so I upgraded them for a set EMG Geezer Butler P/J set of pickups, and what an improvement, it now sounded amazing.

 

Later I bought another Mikro Bass, the GSRM20B model with black hardware and in Weathered Black finish.

 

However I wasn't as lucky with this one as it featured absolutely horrible fret work, with buzz all over.

 

Eventually I transplanted the neck of my first Mikro Bass to the unusually light Mahogany body of the second Mikro Bass, as well as I ditched the J pickup, and wired the Geezer P pickup directly to the jack output socket, the stock side mounted barrel type one replaced for a regular jack socket and moved up front, installed in one of the now redundant pot holes.

 

Love this little bass to bits, and it has been my main instrument of choice for quite a while, but while it does sound great strung with regular bass strings and tuned in regular E standard tuning with it's just 28.6" scale length it really shines in tenor bass tuning, that is A standard tuning, as in the 4 upper strings of a 6 string bass tuned in regular B standard tuning, which among others Stanley Clarke makes wide use of.

 

Now strung with coated Elixir Nanoweb guitar strings of the gauges .068 - .052 - .038 - .028, threaded through the cut off ball end of old bass strings, for the guitar strings not to fall through the bridge string mounting holes.

 

I will also most likely eventually swap out the bridge for individual ABM bass mono rail bridge pieces, milled from solid brass, that I then plan to install with a 17mm string spacing (current stock bridge is standard 19mm string spacing).

 

Here it is (the knob closest to neck now red though), "Dud Bottomfeeder", as I named it:

 

I also ponder on transplanting the black tuning mechanisms for the two lower strings from the GSRM20B scrapped dud neck, as well as I ponder on installing the EMG Geezer J pickup again, but wiring it to another jack output socket, so the two pickups can be mixed actively off board, even if I am actually extremely satisfied with the tone I get from just the Geezer P pickup.

 

 

Edited October 14, 2023 by Baloney Balderdash

[Pow_22]

My main and favourite bass is a 1985 MIJ 57 RI P bass that is completely stock.  However, every now and then i consider upgrading the pickups for something a bit hotter but still vintagey.....resisted the temptation so far but that itch never goes away.....

[Jean-Luc Pickguard]

I have a pair of Epiphone Vintage Pro Thunderbirds in sunburst and white. I really like the vintage look of them but the stock wilkinson tuners, although perfectly functional just didn't look right to on on the massive headstock so I upgraded them to gotoh gb640 res-o-lites, which are perect as unlike other large plate tuners they wind the normal way rather than reverse. Also being made of duralumin — the same alloy as the frame of the hindenberg, they are super lightweight.

 

[neepheid]

3 minutes ago, Jean-Luc Pickguard said:

I have a pair of Epiphone Vintage Pro Thunderbirds in sunburst and white. I really like the vintage look of them but the stock wilkinson tuners, although perfectly functional just didn't look right to on on the massive headstock so I upgraded them to gotoh gb640 res-o-lites, which are perect as unlike other large plate tuners they wind the normal way rather than reverse. Also being made of duralumin — the same alloy as the frame of the hindenberg, they are super lightweight.

 

 

Oh, the humanity!

[AMV001]

I have a 1983 Jazz that had a serious problem with string to string volume (the bottom E was twice the volume of the others). Pulled out the stock pickups and installed a pair of DiMarzio Model J, which have adjustable pole pieces. Set the heights to even out the volume. Made a world of difference. While I was at it I also did a parallel/series mod, using the neck volume on a push/pull pot. Series mode is great- loud and fat.

[NancyJohnson]

First and foremost I'm fairly picky about the basses I've bought (one or two clunkers, but hey-ho), so wouldn't necessarily buy anything that doesn't fit my needs.

 

Upgrade routes?  Always put Dunlop Straploks on everything and with the old Thunderbird basses I'd always swap the bridge to either the Hipshot or Babicz replacements.  

 

More recently I've dropped John East circuits into my Lulls.  They just expand things, give them a bit more oomph.  That's all really.

[JohnDaBass]

Like many above I have always tinkered with basses to make them just that little more personal and different.

One very satisfying upgrade was to add an Artec Mudbucker and a G&L MFD to a DeArmond Jet Star.

Controls V/Blend/ T.

 

Lots of other examples , maybe I will post a few?

[Lozz196]

I’ve recently gone short scale and have added Hipshot triple string retainers to my JMJ Mustangs. The angle from the nut on the A isn’t bad without them to be honest but it just gives me a bit of peace of mind as the A can be troublesome on Fenders.

[crazycloud]

I've modified so many basses, I wouldn't know where to start. Pickups, electronics, bridges and tuners have all been changed at some point, with the first two being of my own design and build on occasion.

 

My first bass, an Ibanez Blazer got an addition SD Jazz PU in the bridge; I paid for it to be routed but did all the rest of the work myself.

 

Currently, I have several instruments, guitars and basses with parts on hand or in transit to modify. One day soon, I'll just clean off the dining table and spend several hours and do them all at once. I'll post details when they're done.

 

PS: First big job is the new music room, desk and recording area. I've been waiting on the custom commissioned desk for over a year, but am going to 'outback modify' another desk I had in store for the purpose. It's still too small, but will have to do in the interim, and the 'rack' will be components stacked on top of each other on a milk crate sized box.

Edited October 15, 2023 by crazycloud

[Machines]

  

Here's MTD Kingston Super 5 I got earlier this year, has been upgraded periodically and now is 10/10. It was perfectly serviceable stock, but I saw a few examples of these mods and they looked so much better.  

 

Biggest differences are probably aesthetic (no more easily tarnished chrome), but a few practical ones too (e.g. switching, and passive option). It did cost me a small fortune, but I can't see myself ever selling it. With the 3 way coil taps giving 15 sound options and this preamp, it can pretty much do everything.

 

I am most pleased that I installed all of these myself, too (with only mild swearing).

 

• Bartolini DL5CBC Pickups
• Bartolini HR-5.4AP/918 Preamp (18v)
• Hipshot B Style bridge
• Hipshot Ultralite tuners
• MTD USA Knobs
• Dunlop Straplocks
• 2 x 3 way coil taps (Removed series option to have single coil/parallel/single coil)
• Satin finish polished to semi-gloss.

 

  

Edited October 15, 2023 by Machines

[Marty Forrer]

My latest tinkerer toy is a cheap as chips Aria Pro II 313 Detroit. I bought it new solely to be a modder bass. It has a great roasted neck and rosewood board and is under 8lbs. Mods are: Hipshot Ultralite USA tuners, Dunlop straplocks, Seymour Duncan P pup, DiMarzio UltraJazz J pup, replaced 500k pots with 250k pots and black pearloid pickguard I made, although I've since gone back to the tortoiseshell original. I've also since gone to Ernie Ball Slinky Cobalt Flats. I also gave it a fret level (although it didn't really need it ) and rounded off the fret ends.

 

[MJJS]

I wanted to try out the ACG01 filter preamp that John East sells on an fretless and so decided to utilise a Harley Benton as a vehicle to house it. The bass is ridiculously good and comfortable for the money before I made any changes.

However I ploughed on and replaced the preamp and the strings with D’Adarios chrome flats that I’ve found the best fretless string for my taste.

The result is a pretty good WAL-a-like (to an extent) but a rather indulgent build.