Pickup weirdness (or maybe it's just me..)

[dlenaghan]

Hi all,

First, thanks for the forum.. I just got my new (to me) '70 JS-II.. pics below if all goes well. Knocked to heck, and some fuzz in the pots as well as a (not kidding) balsa wood saddle (replacement rosewood saddles from GuildBassParts.com on the way, I'm not a seller or endorser, just happy to find some reputed replacements) as well as a bridge pickup ring from HangstromParts.se (if they ever answer my email.. PLEASE GUYS!!)..

But all in all the finest bass I've ever played, bar none: an upper register I can actually reach, a narrow neck that's fat, great woody tone out of the Hagstrom bridge humbucker as well as oomph from the neck Bisonic, but a few odd things that I've been wondering about.

I've never had a bass this old, so perhaps it's just 'old' technology:

- the tone rolloff seems to have one point only, with no degrees of in between on both pickups. So, it sounds like there's full bass for 20% of the knob's turn with an abrupt full treble on the remaining 80%. True for both knobs.

- using the pickup selector to get both going seems finicky. Say I've got the Bisonic at 70% volume, set to treble. Any adjustment I make to the bridge humbucker seems to takeover the sound completely, including adjustments to the volume. It's like any setting on whichever pickup was set first is overwritten (absurd it seems, I know) by any later adjustment. This works both ways. Say I dial in a nice dry bridge-heavy sound and back off the volume a bit, but I fill in the low end with the neck pickup. Any adjustment to the neck pickup, whether it's louder, quieter, bassier, or trebly-er (we'll pretend that's a word for a moment here) seems to redefine the sound completely. It basically makes it difficult to dial in repeatable settings, which would be problematic for using different tones for different songs or adjustments on the fly. I don't know if I've described this last one very sensibly..

One of the guys over at LetsTalkGuild mentioned something about attenuated frequencies due to different values of the resistors in dual pup mode.. not fixable?

Did I mention the Bisonic came off during shipping? As in, the tape securing it to the underside of the chrome bracket finally gave way? Seems like that might be the easiest fix..

Cheers, and here's hoping Guild sees some sense and reissues these things. I've honestly never been SO satisfied with a bass' initial setup (I mean how it was built, not just how it's presently set-up), sound, and playability.

[GlennW]

Originally Posted by dlenaghan

...ring from HangstromParts.se (if they ever answer my email.. PLEASE GUYS!!)..

If you mailed your request to that address there's your problem; try Hagstrom instead of Hangstrom.

Nice bass. I've never seen one with both types of pickups. Have you looked at the route for the Bisonic; does it look factory?

Maybe it has linear pots causing the abrupt roll-off...just a guess.

Edit: The bridge humbucker is a Guild pickup, not a Hagstrom. The neck pickup is a Hagstrom single coil. All the Guild HB's I've seen had 3 height adjustment screws, two on one side and one on the other.

[dlenaghan]

Whoops. Yeah, that was a late night typo, I did get an initial response for Hagstrom, but no follow up about an invoice. Apparently the JS-IIs had this pickup combination for less than a year, mine is a late 1970 from near the very end of that production run. I've seen two other stock examples of this setup. Before this was a dual Bisonic version, and then it was the Guild humbuckers following. The Hagstrom guy did claim both the pickups were theirs; the Guild humbucker is much larger, and the routing is all factory which is great until it comes to finding replacement parts.