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blend pot problems

#22
warnan said:
hi John, nice to see you here. Maybe i am your first j-retro deluxe customer in mainland China. i bought it at bestgear.com 2002, at that time i wanna made myself the best jazzbass, with jretro and lindy fralin, badass........but 7years past i only made a jazz body.........
Hope you could help me find a right blend pot.
my friend who is a luthier(www.kuanchi7.com basskuanchi7.spaces.msn.com) is your fan but he never used your preamps just by watch the pics,funny.
Click to expand...

I asked Brian Ristola at Best Bass Gear to check his blend pot but his isn't the M/N taper. He also checked the StewMac blend pot and tells it gives readings as M/N.

I'm sure I have a few kicking around that I've used for test purposes so if you PM me your address I could send you one.
 
#23
hello all, this is my first post around these parts (i'm a regular over at TGP).

the blend/balance pots allparts sells are the correct type. "m/n" is a description i haven't heard before, but these behave like they should. when set to the center detent, there is basically zero resistance between the center lug and one side of each pot, and max resistance to the other lug of each pot.

at the center, it does pretty much nothing (letting full signal through), and just turns one pickup or the other down when turned from center.

i didn't realize pan pots on jazz bases were such a source of angst!

i'm a guitar player who occasionally gets hired to bang on a p-bass with a pick:rolleyes:, but i just scored a jazz bass for the (real) bass player in my regular band. i plan on modding it with a master and a pan pot, as he's used to 1-volume music mans.

the thing is, i've come to appreciate the tone of passive basses with "unloaded" pickups, i.e., higher resistance pots to leave in all the volume and high end of the pickups. my am std p-bass with a fralin pickup, 500k linear taper volume and 500k audio taper tone just roars, giving me the full gamut from really zingy to fully dark with just the tone knob.

i want to do the same thing to this jazz, but the extra pickup makes it tricky. 2 500k volumes would give me an effective 250k load, brighter than stock but not what i'm looking for. a 500k master and a 500k blend pot would present 3 500k loads, bringing it down to below 200k. i could use a 1meg volume, but the sweep would likely not be as good (the 500k linear is perfect). a volume and a 3-way switch would do the trick, at the cost of losing any blending options.

i want to try a blend pot wired as per normal, but without grounding the outside lugs of the two pots. my hypothesis is that not presenting those 500k loads to ground will prevent any loss, while the increasing resistance in-line when turning the blend pot will hopefully be able to turn each pickup down enough to get a good range of blended tones. it won't let me turn either pickup all the way off, but that might not be an issue, depending on what it sounds like.

has anyone tried this? i'll of course report how (if) it works out.
 
#25
walterw said:
i want to try a blend pot wired as per normal, but without grounding the outside lugs of the two pots. my hypothesis is that not presenting those 500k loads to ground will prevent any loss, while the increasing resistance in-line when turning the blend pot will hopefully be able to turn each pickup down enough to get a good range of blended tones. it won't let me turn either pickup all the way off, but that might not be an issue, depending on what it sounds like.

has anyone tried this? i'll of course report how (if) it works out.
Click to expand...
it works! actually, it works really well.

all i had was a 250k blend/balance pot, and i was worried that leaving off the ground connections would cause it to not turn either pickup down enough to be useful. in fact, it made the sweep slow enough to be more useful than blend knobs typically are, but when turned all the way to one side or the other, the pickup in question still turned off properly.

it exhibits no volume loss in the middle, and along with the 500k linear volume and 500k audio tone, made the stock american standard jazz in question louder and clearer in all settings.

once i get some fralins in there, i think it's going to kill!
 
#27
dmusic148 said:
That might be cool. Another thing to try, as weird as it sounds, is to wire both pups to one pot, as a master volume. No blending options, but some folks find they run both pups equal all the time anyway, myself included.
Click to expand...

I just did this on my backup bass.

I converted a V/V/T Jazz to just V/T with no blending. My main bass is a V/B/T setup, but I never move the blend off the center detente.
 

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