isaac42

FWIW, it's pretty easy to reduce the brightness of a pickup. Lower resistance on the volume control potentiometer will reduce the amplitude of the resonance peak, reducing the brightness. A capacitor to ground will lower the resonance frequency, making it less trebly, more midrangey. Either is easily done, and easily reversed if you don't like the effect. Either is way less expensive than a new pickup. OTOH, neither will make a bad pickup into a good one. Still, might be worth a try. I made a test box to put different caps in the circuit. A similar box could be made to put resistors in parallel. Two boxes, or one with two switches, and you can test the effects of both.

You could, but you don't need to. The resistance of the wire is completely negligible in this context. Simple, solid hookup wire is up to the task. Shielded wire is often used from the pickup to the controls, but not always. In my experience, shielded wire is rare inside the control cavity. Many people will shield the cavity itself. Odds are you won't need to.

That one's plenty beat up.

I think it's called the volute, and is intended to strengthen the neck-to-headstock transition. Not all instruments have it.

No, but I can check with the rightful owner.

The bare wire is the ground wire, so that's easy. The simplest and most common way to wire a humbucking pickup is with the two coils in series. Seymour Duncan uses those colors, so I'll assume that what you have is the same. In that case, you'd use the black wire as the hot lead, green as neutral. Red and white go together, taped off so that they don't touch anything else. There are other things you can do, of course. There six ways you can wire the two coils, but in my opinion only three are useful, those being both coils in series, both coils in parallel, and one coil by itself. Probably the most common option is to "coil split". What that means is to short out one coil, so that you're using only one coil, essentially making it a single coil pickup. Here's a diagram showing one way to do that.

A friend of mine has a strat with a ten-way switch. The switch looks like a standard five-way, but it has an up-down function as well. So, five up positions and five down. I haven't worked out how many possible combinations there are with two single coil pickups and one humbucker, but it's a lot. He's trying to figure out the best five, so he doesn't have the complexity of a ten-way.

True!

I can see I wasn't clear. A humbucking pickup is typically wired with the coils in series. A four wire humbucker can be wired six different ways, one coil, the other coil, both in series, both in parallel, and series and parallel "out of phase", which I don't find useful. But a three wire humbucker (two wires and a ground) cannot be. However, two three wire humbuckers can be wired together in the six ways listed above.

Individual pickups can't go series/parallel, but it could be done between the two pickups. And are you sure about ignoring the white wire completely? Seems to me that the red wire would be hot, the white wire neutral, and the bare wire grounded to the housing. If I'm right about that, then the white wire has to come into play at some point, or you won't have a complete circuit.

A few thoughts. There are six permutations possible with two pickups: both in series, neck only, both in parallel, bridge only, both in series with polarity reversed ("out of phase") and both in parallel with polarity reversed. I find the last two pretty much useless for bass. With the original control layout, you could have one, the other or both. The push-pull pot could implement series/parallel. You don't say what value the pots are. Higher values accentuate the resonance peak. I think it gives the sound more character, but it can be overdone. 500K, even 1M are worth a try. A capacitor can be wired in series with one of the pickups to roll off the low end. Rickenbacker does this. It used to be undefeatable, but now they have a push-pull switch to defeat it. A diode can be wired in place of the tone cap to provide some asymmetrical clipping, adjustable with the tone control.

FWIW, I'll throw my two cents in. 3-wire humbuckers are signal (hot), neutral and ground. I would expect a bass like this to be wired with each pickup going to a switch, then the outputs of the switches to the volume and tone pots. Pretty simple. You don't say what kind of switch is on the push-pull pot. If it's a DPDT, you could use it for a series-parallel switch. Series ought to give you a particularly fat sound. That's sticking with the original pickguard and control arrangement. If you're willing to ditch the original pickguard, you could do more. Independent volume controls, for instance. Volume/pan/tone. What do you want to do?

I'm not seeing any indication that the headstock was grafted on. And the wood all looks like mahogany, not alder. Pickup placement doesn't match with the Gibson pic, nor does the routing for the controls. I have no idea what it is, but I don't think that's it.

Sounded fine at band practice. Switch worked better, too.

The pickup selector switch on my Rickenbacker 4003W was sticking, so I opened it up. I was expecting to find a wayward wire getting in the way, but that wasn't the problem. Instead, it seemed to be sticking on a piece of the switch itself. I bent some things around, and it seems to be working better now. Then I figured, as long as I've got it open, might as well shield the cavity. So I broke out some copper foil and did that. Not as clean a job as some others I've seen, but I was pleased. It wasn't as difficult as I had feared. The copper foil tape is pretty forgiving, and not as fragile as I thought it might be. It tore on me only once. When I was done, everything still worked, so I didn't screw it up too badly! Can't tell how well it worked, though. My house is not a very electrically noisy environment. Neither is the studio where we practice. So, I won't know for sure how well it works until I get into a noisy venue. Can't be worse, though, right?

So, who is the actual thread killer?

I can see it perhaps being useful for recording, but it seems to me that a bit of foam or a rag would do as well. Also, you say behind the nut, but when I see pics of it, it's actually on the fretboard.

Maybe the neck. Maybe the nut was too high?

A lot of playing the bass cleanly is learning to mute the strings not being played. I remember it being a challenge when I first started. Now, I do it without thinking. But the portion of the string between the note being fretted and the nut? I don't think I've ever noticed that being a problem. How would the pickups sense it?

I recently bought a gauss meter for measuring magnetic flux. Measured the magnets on some Bartolini pickups that I installed in a Glarry Jazz bass. They measured at about 27mT. Then I took it to band practice. The humbucking pickups on a Gibson 336 also measured about 27mT. On my 1979 Rickenbacker 4001, on which I did the magnet mod, both pickups measured about 35mT. The pickups on a Squier Jazzmaster measured about 90mT. Seems to me that this means that there's a lot of room to increase the output of some pickups without any danger of deleterious effects.

It occurs to me that it might also be a Stingray.

I've never tried it. Never seen any in person.

Lifetime supply of strings on its way!

Damn. When I played professionally, we played 5 hours a night, 6 nights a week!

Could be!