meet Bragi (A.K.A. my heavily modded DA Starfire)

[mellowgerman]

Just finished up the mods on this one (for now)
Started out as a stock Dearmond Starfire bass



The mods are as follows:

1. Fred Hammon Dark Star pickups
2. HAS Varitone Plus controls (chicken-head knob and the push/pull pot next to it)
3. master volume pot
4. pickup selector switch (changed location)
5. bass contour control
6. thumb rest

This thing is sooo versatile now. It's excellent. The best part is, it's completely passive!

[hellboy]

Wow!

The Varitone is a midrange notch filter? And the bass contour I assume rolls off low frequencies? Can you tell me how you use those with the Dark Stars?

Also, a minor cosmetic question - the binding looks white, is that the real color or a trick of the photo? The binding on mine is a cream that's almost yellow.

[mellowgerman]

The binding is creamy yellowish. The photo was taken with my cellphone camera in the sunlight so the colors a little weak. (my wood floor is a lot browner in reality too)

You're right about the controls. I had a varitone/darkstar combo in the past on my Ibanez artcore and found it to be great, but very bassy when engaged; almost a little too bassy at times. Therefore I got the varitone plus (which lets you do a little blending between your normal and varitoned signals, via the extra push/pull pot) as well as the bass contour which lets me roll off the bass a bit. together they are a match made in heaven! as you can probably imagine, they work very well with the high output darkstars.
i wired them as master controls. Played with the idea of getting a set for each pickup but decided I would never get around to practicing anymore; i'd just be tweaking my tone during all my free time

[hellboy]

Ah, I was wondering if there was more variation in the Starfires than I'd realized.

I'm fond of guitars with lots of knobs and switches, personally. If you record a demo at some point, let me know, I'm curious to hear how it sounds.

[mellowgerman]

Originally Posted by hellboy

Ah, I was wondering if there was more variation in the Starfires than I'd realized.

I'm fond of guitars with lots of knobs and switches, personally. If you record a demo at some point, let me know, I'm curious to hear how it sounds.

Will do. I plan on doing it sometime soon... it's just that with so much versatility in the sound... I'm going to be forced to record several. can't pick just one

[depalm]

Yep, sound clips would be nice!

Congrats on your bass!

[lousybassist]

Now there's a cool mod! I bet it sounds great, and I really like the way it looks now, with all the extra controls.

Oh, and I'm curious to hear what it sound like too.

[markjazzbassist]

love the bass man. really have me jonesin for one too now

[Fred Hammon]

I play my Dark Starred DeArmond Starfire a lot.
It's in rotation with other basses at my steady gig but it gets played the most. Simply put, I have the most fun with it.

It's hard to believe that just 9 years ago Sam Ash was throwing them out the door for $200 (without Dark Stars).
They're hard to find now under $500 (more with HSC) but they're usually in great condition when you do find them because almost nobody played them with their stock pickups.


Fred

[Thaxt]

Yeah, that thing is causing major envy here.

Tuneable notch filters are pretty easy to breadboard. I took a 600 Hz notch filter, shown in the Boscorelli Stompbox Cookbook as used in Gibson & Ampeg SVT amps. It's a passive circuit, too. I just changed the components around to taste, varied caps , etc, then ran my Casady Sig bass thru it & noted all the useful tonalities.

It's amazing what you can do w passive electronics, before you even get to pedals or amps. Dark Stars sound like they are very malleable that way. Great post, awesome axe -

[xaxxat]

Beautiful...

[propel]

absolutely gorgeous!