bart J's

[On The DL]

I recently had two bart J's installed in my spector legend and though I'm liking the tone more, I still get enough constant hissing/noise to bother me.

I thought this might be the stock preamp as it was noisy before the p/u swap, but could it be something else, such as not enough shielding etc.? Last weekend I was using a bass head and 4x10 cab and had a horrible buzz, but when I turned and stood perpendicular to the cab, it was much more quit- so I know at least this part of the issue isn't the preamp. The same thing happened again today using a bass pod.

If it is a shielding problem, is this something I could fix myself? If so, are there any good threads or sites dedicated for instructing in this process?

thanks, Steven

[Mushroo]

Noise like that (static or buzzing that changes as you move the bass around) is normal for single coil pickups (assuming the barts are single coil). There's a good shielding tutorial stickied at the top of this forum. That will help a lot, but it will not turn your single coils into humbuckers. The cheapest way to do that is to set both pickups to the same volume, they then form a giant humbucker. Obviously, the quietest (and most expensive) solution would be to install humbucking stack- or split-coil J pickups.

[Mushroo]

ps And of course, it could be the preamp as well--does your preamp have a bypass so you can test this hypothesis?

[On The DL]

not that I'm aware of. I'm fairly new to electrical side of bass playing, but when the original emg p/u's where still in the bass, there was just as much constant extra noise, unaffected by moving the bass around. I do know that there is currently shielding, but there was none added or altered at the time of p/u swap.