All-Together Now (All-together Now!) All-Together Now ...

 So here is where things started out Sunday afternoon installing new guts for my 1995 Fender MB-4 bass...

Basically, everything was soldered excepting the grounds. I needed to widen the holes just a bit for the new pots and also fashion a new hole in the cavity for a momentary kill switch (ala Buckethead).

First thing I did though is shield the cavity with some Faraday Tape.

Next widened the pot holes using a hand wood reamer and added hole/momentary kill switch.

And finally got everything connected and seated...  (Ha, my friend J.A.S. would say, "You can tell I've been in there.")

Looks pretty good from the outside!

Below is the finished guitar: New pot assembly from KellingSound88 on eBay and new P/J pickups from Fralin Pickups out of Richmond, Virginia.

All was not without friction however, when I had everything put together the pickups wouldn't engage except when the instrument cable was only about halfway inserted. And even then the momentary kill switch, which did work, had kind of "pop" when activated (this indicated the switch was just cutting the hot wire instead of grounding it as the design was supposed to).

So I figured some kind of short was created when I flattened out the wires into the cavity to put the cover plate back on. Opening everything up I didn't see anything unexpected, so I just took extra care that no bare wire was crossed anywhere then sealed the guitar back up.

Then the bass played extra fine and the instrument cable jack was as normal. There also was just the most minimal of noise at high volume (hiss noise from the original pickups are what started me down this project). The Fralin pickups a superb. Coupled with the new pot assembly I can get everything from an acoustic-sounding low-end to a very crunchy overtone-laden mids/highs.

Unfortunately the momentary kill switch no longer works. Not sure whether there is an internal bad connection that broke. I checked the wires and everything was connected as it should be before re-installing the cavity plate. Right now I am just enjoying the bass as it is. I might look for a different kill switch that will fit the 12mm hole I drilled. Ha, the button looks cool by itself even if it does not actually do anything.

New Pot Assembly

So... the tone on the new (to me) vintage Fender MB-4 is awesome. Except that I have an annoying A/C signal hum. Not really noticeable when jamming along, but it's certainly there when I want to be silent.

Checked everything out - it's not pedals or cable or amp or any intervening device - the noise is coming from the bass. I went and found Seymour Duncan has a wiring diagram for P/J pickups with a blend knob, and their schematic shows a bunch of grounds going to the master volume pot. However in the MB-4 it appears there has been some wiring work done, and the majority of grounds have ended up on the volume pot (see below). 

Now, J.A.S. my friendly tech friend, says that should not be a problem although any loose ground will act just like an antenna for AC or other frequency hum. Ha, advice from Sick Rick was "I don't mess around with other people's work anymore, I just buy a new assembly."

I went on eBay looking around and found this dude KellingSound88 who makes all sorts of pot assemblies, 5,767 reviews since 2002... 100% positive! And I found a P/J with blend assembly.

Per KellingSound88: P/J Bass Harness with Bridge pickup blend pot, this wiring is perfect for the P/J setup this allows you to blend in the bridge pickup a little or all the way with the Neck pickup, but it doesn't give the bridge by itself. The blend pot is A500k and is no load so when its all the way up its out of the circuit giving a fuller sound. The Volume is A250k with a treble bleed circuit. The tone pot is A500k with a .082 Vitamin Q paper in oil capacitor this gives a smooth taper adding a little treble cut but will give dark tone when all the way down than a .047 giving a wider range of tone options.

And the piece arrived with a nice handwritten note of where to wire the pickups and grounds.

I am looking to install sometime before our next Dismalhead jam and I am really looking forward to it. The assembly is total craftsmanship down to cloth-wrapped wires and rubber-covered connections for the jack. Ha, however it is funny for once I want something that IS a buzz kill.

New Vintage Bass

a Yamaha BB1000S

Ok, waaaay back in days of yore (like 1992) I bought this awesome bass, a Yamaha BB1000S (plus a hard-shell case), for $100 from a security gendarme at this computer company where I worked. During the Geo Pigs and Ripon days this bass, passive, thru-neck, heavy-duty bridge, really stepped up my game at the time. Great tone, great sustain, easy on the fingers. Unfortunately round about 1995 someone swiped the guitar from my open garage. Betwixt the time of acquiring and losing the bass it became apparent that this was an expensive instrument and quite well could have been "hot" to begin with. So I never pursued trying to recover it by contacting police, guitar shops, etc.

The thing that captivated me as different from other bass guitars with a "PJ" pickup configuration, was that the Precision-style pickups toward the neck were reversed from the standard setup so that the top split-coil pickup was on the treble side of the strings. Somehow I felt that made the difference in tone I enjoyed.

Probably 4, 5, 6 years ago I developed an itch to play 4-string bass again. I had been jamming on a 5-string Ibanez for some years and had gifted that to Owl-man son. Getting another Yamaha was pretty much out of the question as similar vintage models like my former start around $1,000 and head up from there. Then I somewheres ran across the Fender Modern Bass 4 (MB-4). 

Now, there are 2 versions of the MB-4 bass. The original is a straight Fender made in Japan at the FujiGen Gakki manufacturing company in the early 1990s. The story goes that Fender was losing instrument market-share to more modern styled instruments manufactured by Yamaha, Ibanez, and other Japanese companies that formerly made copies of US brand guitars and were branching out into their own designs.

Fender took off all the rails for FujiGen to come up with whatever they considered as a great, modern design for a new bass, which ended up as the MB-4 (and the MB-5 5-string version). A passive, PJ-style bass with a pan pot instead of pickup switch, drastic body cutaways (making the instrument super light), and doing away with the traditional Fender head stock and tuners for Gretsch knobs 2 on the top and 2 on the bottom.

my Fender MB-4

Well, the design flopped. The guitar was produced only from 1994 to 1996 and went out of production. That wasn't the end of the story however. Fender in 2001 released a made-in-Indonesia Squier version MB-4 that became quite popular, especially the "Skull and Crossbones" version Fender sold from 2003 to 2011. Although, the Squier body design wasn't as sleek and the electronics were typical low-end Squier.

For me, though, since 2017-18 I kept looking for a good-condition Fender MB-4 with the problem being they were either too expensive or too beat up. It didn't help that around 2020 I discovered a super-pristine MB-4 (with the original case) that made my jaw drop. And also made anything less unacceptable (in particular replacement pot knobs vs the original Fender ones. Bleh!).

Fast forward to the present and I have a new work gig that is bringing in some extra dough, and that pristine MB-4 was looking better and better, a siren song for sure. But I thought, "well crap, if I get the bass I don't really want a super pristine vintage because I'm going to modify it and not keep it vintage. Not the thing to do with a limited collectable." JUST THE MOMENT AFTER I THOUGHT THIS I go on eBay and boom there is a newly-listed MB-4 in super good condition (with original Fender pot knobs) at half the price (no case though) and I jumped on it.

The bass has been everything I wanted it to be, with a melodic, overtone, almost industrial tone that I love. My modifications: I replaced the original bridge with a Fender HiMass bass bridge, added Fender Schaller-style strap locks, surrounded the control cavity with Faraday tape to limit electro-magnetic noise, put a Fender Fatfinger sustainer enhancer on the headstock, and pulled my Dog Dayz strap off my Ibanez Gibson copy (Dog Dayz are out of business and their straps are unobtanium).

I have been practicing the new setup for a few days and my first Dismalhead jam with the guitar will be this coming Saturday. My jamming future is looking bright!

DE1200HD Noodling

Here is a little "Noodling" demo of the Kustom DE1200HD with Takamine B-10 acoustic. Everything is clean, direct from bass to the amp. The equalizer is set bass boosted at 1 o'clock, mid is flat, and the treble is boosted about 1 o'clock. Room contour e.q.'s are both flat. Takamine acoustic pre-amp is roughly the same, bass and treble both boosted a hair.

New Gear

 

(Kustom DE1200HD)

Wifey often remarked I have untreated ADHD, one of the ways it "may" show up is hyperfixation.

I really like my Kustom Deep End DE300HD hybrid amp, solid state with a tube pre-amp. The problem is that I had a complete misunderstanding of headroom, I did not know an under-powered amp compared with the speaker can at high volume can start overdriving and create tones that damage the speaker. It turns out, for bass at least, the desired wattage is slightly higher than speaker wattage. This additional "headroom" ensures you have a clean tone signal even at higher volume. (There are various technical explanations of this.)

Well when researching Owl-man's new amp I learned the above, plus that my 300 watt DE300HD was rated at 4ohms while my 300 watt Eminence speaker is rated at 8ohms. At 8ohms my old Deep End was only putting out 180 watts... NEGATIVE HEADROOM!

The first place my brain went is "Can you increase the wattage of an amp?" Yes you can, but it is only recommended if you are learning to be an electrician i.e. much more trouble than it is worth.

Then I was looking around, and I had heard of the Kustom DE1200HD, but I thought 1200 watts is way more than what I need. But revisiting that amp I found the specs are that the amp is 1200 watts PEAK (ha, Behringer wattage). The amp is 600 watts at 4ohms RMS, which is actually the rating you want to compare. AND at 8ohms baby that is 360 watts for my 300 watt Eminence - perfection!

Now to actually get a DE1200HD in my grubby hands was a little more crazy, but it happened. The only real dilemma is that there is an earlier model with a 1/4" and a Speakon speaker jacks, and apparently a later model (as advertised on Kustom's website) with 2 Speakon jacks and a few other minor modifications.

My best guess, because basically every retailer has these amps on backorder, is that the newer version has not been released yet (any pictures of the newer version back have no serial number). And the original version looks like it only had a very limited release. There are almost no reviews and no vids of the DE1200HD performing in the wild.

Do I care, ha, of course not. I live on the mental pictures in my brain becoming reality. Anyhow, new amp has arrived after some beck and forth with Fed Ex and I hope to test run at jam volumes soon. It already seems to sound tighter even at low volume. Joy! Rapture!

Pedalboard Strip-down

 

Now that I am jamming fretless acoustic-electric, which has a built-in pre-amp which includes a reverb, I dropped all the external electronic signal modifiers. Owl-man now son the first is reigning bass for a couple of bands, so I took most useful for the pedals and assembled a mini-board for him.

Going from left to right...

MORLEY 20/20 VOLUME PLUS. Again, there is a footswitch activates adjustable minimum volume setting, so you can't accidently step on the pedal too hard and die off.

ELECTRO-HARMONIX DELUXE BIG MUFF PI pitched by Tony Levin. The Big Muff is the first pedal I bought just for bass. Super versatile from growly fuzz to tight overdrive.

BOSS OCTAVE OC-5. Deep synth-like bass, also an organ-like tone.

TC ELECTRONIC POLYTUNE 3 MINI. Also works as a kill switch when tuning is activated. Incredibly accurate and visible but cost a butt ton of dough for a tuner.

Owl-man

Days of Yore

 Olden-timey band from the early 1990s practiced at The Paradigm, a cool live-jam space that also rented rehearsal studios by the hour. We jammed there every Thursday night for a good part of 1992 until our drummer began dating a sex worker. Then his nights and weekend he had to babysit. 

The Paradigm in 2020...