Adding a maple top to a body?

[CrashAlpha]

Hello experts,

In an earlier post in this corner, I detailed my problems with the 1980 BC Rich Son of a Rich and why I am looking to get some work done on it. Apparently, although rare, it has no great value, so I thought about taking the old war horse and turning it into something nice(r). So, I am looking for a full-service luthier in Montreal.

One problem with the bass is that it is all mahogany, and I never get satisfying top end out of it. From what I have read, this is the nature of mahogany - and mahogany guitars with maple tops are considered well balanced. I was intending on having the guitar repainted anyway.

• Is it feasible to have the top planed and a thick laminate maple top (if that is indeed the wood to use) glued on (I understand their will have to be some work around the sculpted parts of the bass)?
• Will this have any effect on the tone?
• While the bridge will be mounted on the top, does the fact that the neck pocket is still mahogany detract from the effect?
• If there was no effect on the tone, I was thinking that even a slight planing with a thin laminate would give me some finishing options, e.g. semi-transparent finishes. Is this possible?

Thanks!

Carlo

 

[IAmACrocodile]

Hello Carlo!

I do not know a great deal about BC Rich guitars myself, but a bit of quick Googling tells me that at least some of the Son of a Rich basses had maple necks. Do you know whether or not this is the case with your bass? If yours has a maple neck, then personally I suspect that adding a thin maple cap to the body would do very little to alter the tone in the way that you want (with a solid bodied guitar, the neck wood contributes more to the overall tone of the guitar than the wood of the body).

My advice would be to try changing the pots first. Installing 1 Meg (1000 ohm) pots should give you a big, noticeable increase in treble straight away - in fact, it may even be too much, in which case you could change them for 500 ohms. Pots only cost two or three dollars each, and it is a simple and completely reversible mod which can make a huge difference to this kind of problem.

If this does not give you the tone which you are looking for, then there are still the strings, the pickups and the bridge to consider. I can't give you much advice on strings unfortunately, but the strings forum has plenty of experts who can describe the tones of all of the different brands and types. As far as the pickups and bridge are concerned, much depends on how much money you want to spend and the precise tonal change which you are looking for, but you really cannot go wrong with Bill Lawrence, Fralin, Lollar or Seymour Duncan for pickups, and Babicz or Badass might be to your taste, bridge-wise.

As far as adding a veneer for purely aesthetic reasons is concerned, I can't see it making much of a difference to the tone. By all means, go for it if you want to personalise your bass!

Good luck with your project!

 

[Ric5]

Adding a maple top will be a lot of work and that thin piece of veneer will not change the tone much.

 

[CrashAlpha]

Thanks Croc, yes - the neck looks very much like maple. When you say pots, do you mean just the tone pots? Sorry, I've never worked with guitar electronics - does this mean a direct out from the pickup (an old P bass super-hot DiMarzio) is richer in high tones than after the tone pot, even when at "full treble"?

The bridge is a big Baddass - and while I love it, there is a design flaw in these hand-made US-built models. The bridge is so thin and the neck set so low in the pocket that the saddles are at their lowest, with no further room for adjustment. Furthermore, the truss rod is adjusted by a Phillips head in the heel, but as it is set so low in the pocket the head is partially obscured by the body, and the wood gets gouged as you adjust the tension (required with the extreme dry/humid seasonal changes in Montreal).

I had come to this corner some time ago on this topic "should I shim the neck, and what are the best practices?" - but the thread weaved off course debating the value of the bass and sadly I never got an answer to my question.

Ric5 - Is even adding a thin maple laminate for purely aesthetic purposes considered a lot of work? I love the unique look of the bass outline, but with no pickguard and only two knobs, internally it is otherwise a big featureless piece of black wood, and you can't really see it. I added some car pinstripes to it when I got it to give it some character, but now that I am refinishing it, I am looking for ideas to make it stand out as much as it deserves. I thought that a black fade in to a grey semi-transparent center would be interesting, but that's when I figured out that mahogany doesn't have a color or grain which is suitable for this. Of course, there's always the option of another colour - but I'd like to pay hommage to my faithful old axe

 

[Hopkins]

Changing out the volume pot to a pot with more resistance (500k in place of 250k, 1m in place of 500k) will have more resistance to ground, so less high end will be lost.

 

[IAmACrocodile]

You are more than welcome! When it comes to changing the pots, replacing both the volume and the tone pots with 1 Meg would give you a greater increase in the treble frequencies than replacing the tone alone, although replacing just the tone would certainly work (it is really just a matter of experimentation and personal taste anyway ). If you are confident with a soldering iron then you can experiment with 500k or 1 Meg in one or both positions, but if you will be having this job done by your local guitar tech then I would probably go straight for 1 Meg pots in both positions; if it really is too much then you can always come down to 500k.

- does this mean a direct out from the pickup (an old P bass super-hot DiMarzio) is richer in high tones than after the tone pot, even when at "full treble"?

That is a very good question, and I must confess that I don't know the answer! I used to have a Telecaster with a tone-pot bypass (Fender called it the "no load" circuit - this would probably be the term to try if you want to search for information), and I couldn't really say whether the tone which it created was more trebley than with the tone pot at 10... It was definitely a raw, lively tone with prominent trebles and lots of "presence", but whether it was more trebley, strictly speaking, than the full treble position would be very hard to say! It sounded more aggressive, less smooth and had a lot of high end anyway!

Also, I like the sound of the black-to-grey sunburst... Something like this, over a flamed maple veneer, could look beautiful!

 

[Hopkins]

Yes, a pickup wired directly to the output jack will be brighter than a pickup with its signal being bled to ground though a volume pot, because resistance between the outer lugs remains constant. Since one of these pots is grounded, you will always have a signal bleed to ground. A tone pot, will always bleed some signal through the cap. So unless you are using no load pots (which I prefer on a tone pot) there will always be some high end loss.

 

[CrashAlpha]

Interesting... I was going to do some routing and do a dual pickup P/J setup with new Seymore Duncan quarter pounders.

But this old dimarzio roars, with output levels rivaling active guitars. If I could get some tone flexibility out of this guitar as is, I'd be quite happy.

Hopkins, I just read up on the no-load pot, and this sounds like a great solution.

 

[CrashAlpha]

So, in a surprise development it turns out the luthier has gone ahead and started working on my bass. I had originally asked for the black finish to be stripped and replaced with a semi-transparent black finish, and of course everyone expresses misgivings about doing this with mahogany. After stripping the bass, it turns out it's a single solid cut, and a test spray with the semi black on mahogany yielded what appears to be unexpectedly good results, so he charged ahead with the routing for a pair of Seymour Duncan P/J Quarter Pounders - and apparently these sound awesome.

I asked the tech about looking into getting the pots replaced and looking for no-load ones, if possible.

(Now I have a spare vintage hot dimarzio pickup. You do realize I am going to end up building an entire bass around it, don't you?)

Thanks for all the help, guys. I am REALLY looking forward to getting my axe back now!

 

[IAmACrocodile]

That sounds like wonderful news! It's a bit of a shame that your luthier was "ahead of the curve" somewhat in routing out for the new pickups, but you have some very nice discoveries in the single-piece body and the success of the finish tests! No-load pots will waken up the sound, especially if they are 500k or 1 meg. Now you can sit back and think of some good designs for the old DiMarzio pickup...

(If you can pick up another one for a good price, you could build on of these - )

 

[CrashAlpha]

Ooh - never played a pass with a split P pup at the bridge!

Truth be told, the reason I went for the S/D's was partially because I was impressed with the S/D Rick pickup on my 4003 (I bought the Rick used, came with it) but mostly because I wanted a 2nd pup to widen my tone options. And since the pup is 34 years old, the cream cover has yellowed, and I knew that it would be near-impossible to match.

So what am I doing instead? Looking for the best-quality on-line vendor of pre-finished bass bodies and necks... all for one pickup. Because, you know, four basses aren't enough, and one loose pickup is such a waste...