Recent content by fermata

One of the best live bass tones I've ever heard was from a Bass IV playing a traditional bass function in a soul trio.

There are some misconceptions in the intonation portion of this thread: Fretted instruments (like bass guitar and guitar) and pianos are tuned to what's called equal temperament. This allows this instruments to play in all 12 keys. But that flexibility comes at a price: it requires the...

Gorgeous! Here's a great bass line for you: Speaking of French songs featuring Hofners... Standard spacing: Cavern spacing: Looks fabulous! In which case, the top video is for you, too.

Great suggestion! OP, you'll still need to be willing to adjust the volume and tone knobs to suit; it's the nature of MFD pickups. G&L's more traditional P is the LB-100. But given how comfy your are with your Fender P, the idea of a second Fender with brighter strings might be the simplest...

And the TB classifieds also have some great deals on necks and bodies. [/sarcasm]

MFD pickups are a handful when everything is turned up. They behave like more typical pickups with the volume control dialed back a fair bit. I would also recommend dialing the bass and treble controls down to maybe 50% and adjusting from there; although it's a passive circuit, it makes sense to...

You can easily experiment with different cap values without even opening the control panel: unscrew the barrel of your instrument cable where it plugs into the bass. Attach one alligator clip lead to the cable's hot lug; attach another clip lead to the ground lug. Clip a capacitor between the...

SBMM Ray4 (two-band preamp): Bass at center detent or slightly above, treble slightly below center detent or further down. When I had that bass, I hadn't fully grokked that volume controls are useful at settings other than 0 and 10 (although after installing a series/parallel switch, I did use...

Fair enough. When it comes to volume controls, it's really a matter of taste. But for tone controls, only audio taper works (at least how one expects a typical tone control to work).

Nothing, as you can see in the linked diagrams. A resistor in series with a tone cap damps the resonant peak that normally occurs when the tone control is turned to zero. Sometimes, that resistor makes for a smoother, more pleasant tone, sometimes the resonant peak sounds good; it all depends on...

Other way 'round; a linear taper tone pot bunches the audible effect of the control in the last bit of the rotation; audio taper spreads it across the rotation. Linear taper works great for volume controls. According to this fabulous resource http://www.ak-line.com/medium/Bassschaltungen.pdf...

Sweet! As you’ve perhaps discovered, you can turn down the volumes to tame the white-hot pickups, and they’ll take a decent twist before the volume starts to drop. MFDs are quite cool and their own thing.

I’ve been very impressed by the SB-1 and SB-2 basses I’ve tried. I love how responsive MFD pickups are to passive controls. In the case of the SB-2, you can think of the bridge pickup as a tone control (allowing you to add treble); the volume control on the P pickup can be turned down to bleed...

It’s easy to test out different capacitor (or resistor) values without opening your bass: unscrew the barrel of the instrument cable where it plugs into the bass; attach one alligator clip lead to the cable's hot tab; attach another clip lead to the ground tab; clip a capacitor between the free...

Some municipal recycling services can’t take strings because they’re plated or alloys — worth double-checking locally so one doesn’t contaminate the recycling stream. I’ve donated old strings here: Jewelry hand made from repurposed, used guitar strings.