I saved a bass today.

[phyfe]

Kid had an Ibanez SRX300. Preamp had died. No bucks to replace.

Gutted the electronics. Came back with the following: Stock 500K volume pot, Bourns 500K M/N blend pot, A250K Alpha tone pot with .100 Sprague capacitor. NOTE: NO GROUNDS on blend pot or tone pot.

Neck pickup with tone rolled all the way back = very smooth jazz-type tone. Bridge pickup with tone rolled 1/3 to 1/2 way forward gives a nice growl on low strings. I like it. I hope he does, too.

Interesting thing happened on the way to success...

The pickups had a white single conductor lead with shield. Took shield to ground. They also had a black wire that I also took to ground. Plugged in the bass... SILENCE! DEAD! NOTHING!

On a guess, I cut those black wires from the pickups loose from the ground. Oh, yeah! Don't know what those black wires are and don't care. It works. Sounds pretty good. Bass is quiet when not playing.

Oh, I originally installed a 500K tone pot, but the bright tone was MEAN. Not really useable in my opinion. These pups are humbuckers, I think, with pretty high output. Seems like the 250K tamed the high end nicely. Tone is now more balanced across strings.

This plus a badly needed setup. Also adjusted the pickup heights to try and balance volume across the strings. Hope the kid is encouraged.

This is all good experience for the work I'm about to to on my MIJ Jazz: Volume-blend-tone with the Bourns 500K M/N blend pot and a Stellartone B-506 ToneStyler. I'm going to use a volume pot with a push-pull DPDT switch to get series-parallel switching.

Yes, I know that I will have to have the blend pot in the right position (neck pickup, I think) when I switch or I will get a silent bass! Center detent might be OK too, since the M/N blend pots have 100% of each pickup at the detent. We'll see!

Fun stuff. I saved a bass today.