Bronco P/J Question.

If you use a J-pickup, you are correct to use a neck version with the narrower string spacing to better match the Bronco bridge, or a rails type pickup. Use a 4-wire humbucker of some sort to match the Gretch pickup to keep noise and hum down as much as possible. You may need to experiment with the four wires to make sure the J-pickup has the proper coil and magnet polarity and to maintain the humbucking aspect of the pickup. I would exchange out the SD 1/4 as it is too aggressive for the mini-humbucker style of the Gretch pickup.

 

It's not that the Gretsch has two wires. It is that the pickup is a humbucker, with internally two coils. So wiring up any additional pickup per the additional pickup's spec may or may not be in phase electrically and magnetically since each manufacturer has its own way of doing things. So the additional humbucking pickup, if not the same make and model of pickup as the one that is already there, must have the four wires so that they can be matched up.

Yes, a rails pickup would also work, as in that case string spacing over poles is not an issue. I have a Rickenbacker HB-1 humbucker, which is a rails humbucker, in the P-position of my custom half-fanned P/J bass for this very reason.

 

You don't need four conductor wiring to correct phase issues. You just need to make sure that you don't have a pair of epoxy potted pickups with single conductor leads. If at least one pickup has leads that can be wired backwards, then you can correct phase issues easily. Four conductor wiring is useful if you want to get into series/parallel switching, but it isn't necessary here.

 

I have Red Lace in my Bronco. It is a fantastic bass pickup even though I hate it for guitar.

 

I feel what you're saying. I love my Bronco Bass and I think it sounds and plays like a dream. It does seem like, though, that an additional pickup will require an entirely new design for a pickguard because I think the edge of the original guard does not easily accommodate a bridge pickup.

I've put in a lot of money into my Bronco Bass, probably 3x as much as I've spent on the bass itself. I've bought Schaller tuners, new Graphtech TUSQ nut, Lace Red Sensor, Hipshot bridge, and La Bella strings. I just simply love how it sounds and plays.

 

I know unrelated but I wanna make a Double P Bronco Bass. And to you bass I say mod it to heck and back

 

I'm using 250k. Lace actually isn't a humbucker. They're low noise single coils. Regardless you can use 250 or 500 and I personally don't feel strongly one way or the other.

 

I respectfully and completely disagree from my personal experience with my custom half-fanned P/J. It has a Rickenbacker HB-1 pickup in the P-position and a DiMarzio UltraJazz in the bridge position.

Each coil has a magnet polarity AND a winding direction - commonly referred to in the industry as top-going or top-coming, which defines the direction of the windings. So you not only have to match which magnet polarity is working on which coil, but that coil needs to be wired so, if looked at from the top, the direction of the winds goes the same direction. In order to not have phase cancellation between the pickups, since they are both humbuckers, you must make sure the magnets AND the wire winding direction on each bobbin are together. Otherwise, you get the bass equivalent of the "Peter Green" tone (one of the humbucker pickups on his Les Paul had the magnet flipped, causing the tone to thin out. It worked for his guitar style. Not so well on bass).

That means on every conventional two-coil humbucker, whether side-by-side, stacked or split end-to-end, you have four possibilities of wiring a pickup to retain humbucking characteristics, depending on which wire is used for the "hot" lead on which coil: CW-N, CW-S, CCW-N, CCW-S. Each of these has to be matched up properly when working with an unknown humbucker configuration, and it takes trial-and-error to figure it out.

It took me experimenting with the four conductors of the DiMarzio UltraJazz in all possible configurations before I found the sequencing that retained humbucking and was in-phase both electrically and magnetically with the Rickenbacker pickup so there were no dropouts or thinning of the tone with both pickups dimed.

It gets better: you can't go on just the wire colors, either, because every manufacturer has its own color code. A quick google will bring up several charts of the various manufacturer's wiring colors.

I agree if both pickups are single coils and the frames or bobbins are either not grounded or grounded separately from any metal cover: if the signal drops out when both pickups are dimed, then simply flip the wiring on one of the pickups.

But humbuckers are a completely different beast, and if you combine different manufacturers' pickups, then you may have quite a job ahead of you to match them.

Since the OP has ordered two pickups of the same make and model, this makes life much less complicated. Any standard J-bass wiring schematic can be used, and the third wire is grounded separately, according to Lace Sensor directions. FWIW - the Lace Sensor is not a humbucker in the conventional sense. It has some other internal shielding technology and magnet/coil/toothed bobbin features that achieve the same result, but with a totally different configuration.

I probably would have gone with the Blue instead of the Red, since the Red is designed to be so mid-heavy to crunch a lead guitar tone, and the Blue is a little more open and wide-ranging, but not bright like the Gold. And the Silver is more of a Texas Strat tone. I haven't played any of the other newer colors, but I used to have a Strat that had Red in the bridge, Gold in the middle, and Blue in the neck that really rocked. But I always thought Lace Sensors sounded a little too compressed for my taste, and sold them all.