Checking Batteries inside an 18 volt Bass ??????

I have 2 x 9 volt batteries in my Schecter Hellraiser Extreme-5 and I find the best was to check them is to remove them and put them on a battery tester. That way I know I'm getting accurate results as to how much life they have or don't have left. I don't know of any other way to check them.

Good luck.

TD

 

Insert a bare stereo plug (without a shell) into the bass jack. With a multimeter measure the DC volts between the 'sleeve' and 'ring' wire connectors of the bare plug.

 

Yeah, you could always buy a cheap little multi-meter to keep in your gig bag. Then get a 1/4" Stereo Plug, and permanently connect it to the test leads that came with the multi-meter. The red wire goes to the ring terminal and the black wire goes to the sleeve lug. At the gig, plug it in and turn the meter on (on the DC Volts range). It won't tell you which battery is bad, but it will quickly tell you if both are good.

 

If it was me, I'd be doing that check about two hours before leaving for the gig. Call me OCD, but I don't think my bandmates want to see me taking my bass apart backstage.

 

Well, Yeah, I agree. As an obsessive engineer-type, I'd make sure my bass was ready before I left for the gig. Probably even a week before the gig. I consider it a personal embarrassment to have my own bass fail at a gig!
But I'd still take the meter, so that if something did happen, at least I could quickly diagnose it and fix it. The worst thing is to be scrambling around at curtain time, not knowing what's wrong. The ultimate embarrassment for us technical types.

 

Until I retired, I was an historian, non-technical type...but my father was an engineer, and he taught me that Murphy never sleeps. Have you ever heard of a tapewound string breaking? Me neither. But I still keep an extra set in my gig bag.

 

Use a calendar.
Change the batteries every 6 months.

They'll never go dead in that length of time unless you leave the bass plugged in. If you accidentally do that replace them the next day.

I've been doing this for 20+ years and have never had a battery die on a gig.

 

^^^This. The basses that I use most often get changed on New Year's Day and the Fourth Of July. The ones that get less frequent use still get their batteries changed on New Year's Day.

If I'm going into the recording studio they get new batteries a couple days in advance (at the same time that I put on a new set of strings)...and unless that session was in December, I'll still change them again on New Year's Day.

Oh, and all the used batteries that I take out of the basses every 6 or 12 months... I give them to my guitarist friends.