Dark tone Jazz Bass - Doh!

[simoncroft]

I have three similar basses: a Fender Standard 'boner' Jazz Bass from 1989, a partso with a MIM neck and CS pickups I put together, and a Tokai Jazz Sound (probably from China) I've put a lot of work into, including upgrading the pots to CTS. The Tokai is playing really well since I dressed the frets, but the tone was really dark compared to the other two. Given that the Tokai has ceramic pickups, that seemed counter-intuitive, so I opened up the control plate. Everything seemed to be right, so I was a bit mystified.

That's when I bent the legs of the capacitor up to read the value on the side. I'm not expert in the electrical side of things, so it took a Google search to decode what 473K2G actually meant. That's .47uF to us mere mortals. Doh! It should be .047uF. Not sure if I ordered the wrong part, or the supplier messed up. Whatever, I ordered 10 of the correct value for so little money, it's not worth bothering about.

Meanwhile, I took the .47uF out of circuit and, 'hey!' it sounds so much better.

 

[iblive]

I have three similar basses: a Fender Standard 'boner' Jazz Bass from 1989, a partso with a MIM neck and CS pickups I put together, and a Tokai Jazz Sound (probably from China) I've put a lot of work into, including upgrading the pots to CTS. The Tokai is playing really well since I dressed the frets, but the tone was really dark compared to the other two. Given that the Tokai has ceramic pickups, that seemed counter-intuitive, so I opened up the control plate. Everything seemed to be right, so I was a bit mystified.

That's when I bent the legs of the capacitor up to read the value on the side. I'm not expert in the electrical side of things, so it took a Google search to decode what 473K2G actually meant. That's .47uF to us mere mortals. Doh! It should be .047uF. Not sure if I ordered the wrong part, or the supplier messed up. Whatever, I ordered 10 of the correct value for so little money, it's not worth bothering about.

Meanwhile, I took the .47uF out of circuit and, 'hey!' it sounds so much better.

I just swapped out the pots in my 90s Ibanez PJ bass. Don’t know how much of a diff it actually made. But my brain says it did.

 

[simoncroft]

I just swapped out the pots in my 90s Ibanez PJ bass. Don’t know how much of a diff it actually made. But my brain says it did.

I don't really trust those smaller pots. It's not so much that they sound different, just that I don't think they will last as long, or be as consistent across the travel of the tracks. It's cheap enough to swap them out, and it's one less thing to go wrong. The only thing I had to do was drill the control plate, because the shafts are bigger on the full-sized pots.

 

[iblive]

Main reason for the pot swap was several years ago I got the wild idea to change one of the volume pots to a blender. Turn one way…. Neck. The other….. bridge. Ultimately, never liked it so I swapped back to the normal 2-vol and 1-tone.

 

[simoncroft]

Main reason for the pot swap was several years ago I got the wild idea to change one of the volume pots to a blender. Turn one way…. Neck. The other….. bridge. Ultimately, never liked it so I swapped back to the normal 2-vol and 1-tone.

To me, that's a perfectly rational decision you made both times. Seemed like a good idea, so you did it. Didn't work for you, so you put it back to original. I quite like a blend pot, but only on active circuits. Otherwise, I get the impression the centre position is never going to be as loud as both pickups with their individual volumes on full. However, I may be wrong about that.

 

[iblive]

To me, that's a perfectly rational decision you made both times. Seemed like a good idea, so you did it. Didn't work for you, so you put it back to original. I quite like a blend pot, but only on active circuits. Otherwise, I get the impression the centre position is never going to be as loud as both pickups with their individual volumes on full. However, I may be wrong about that.

And that’s what I found. Felt like I lost some punch.