Hello everyone.
I saw very few threads about this kind of replacements and wanted to tell you what I did to my 2005 Cort Artisan A5 bass. It used to have such problems:
Then I bought an Aguilar OBP-3 preamp to replace the stock one. It runs on 9v with settings: 3 band eq [bass-mid (400-800 push/pull selective)-treble], active/passive switch, bridge volume, neck volume. New EQ has brought a life to the bass. I like the way OBP3 works in bass and middle frequencies. 40hz bass and 800hz middle boost are perfect for this bass to produce the tone I am willing to hear. Plus the electrical noise problem is no more. But the distorted sound was still coming when I crank the EQ.
According to a few luthiers, my bass had that kind of torsion on the neck probably because of the wet wood they used when they were manifacturing the bass. The solution was to remove all the frets, level and flatten the keyboard and reinstall frets. So my luthier did all the job, except installing new frets. It's fretless now and the buzzing is gone.
I removed the bridge to smallest parts of it, WD40'ed and dried them with a paper towel, installed back. Bridge works properly now.
The last thing I did on the bass is, changing the pickups. I saw a video on Youtube, a guy reviewing "Aguilar Super Single" pickups and liked it. Bought a set online and installed them with my luthier. They replaced Bartolini mk1's which comes along with the bass. It has a middle and bass oriented mellow, warm sound and a little higher output —I think! The only thing looked like a problem at first, was the whereabouts of bobbin tops which aren't at the same place as my strings. The string spacing was 16 mm on my bass but 18 mm on these pickups. So when the third string was on the spot, first was a little below and the fifth was above the head of the bobbin. I thought I made a mistake but there was no other option when buying the pickup. So I realized it's not being a problem.
Now I'm happy with the result. I'd like to put some recordings of it soon. I hope my experience will be helpful to somebody.
I saw very few threads about this kind of replacements and wanted to tell you what I did to my 2005 Cort Artisan A5 bass. It used to have such problems:
- Because of the torsion in the neck wood, I was always having a buzzing note somewhere.
- After a few years, the bridge got rusty and adjustments weren't working.
- An electrical noise were coming when I record something.
- It was making distortion when EQ was boosted just more than half.
- One of the tuners were trembling when I played any note.
Then I bought an Aguilar OBP-3 preamp to replace the stock one. It runs on 9v with settings: 3 band eq [bass-mid (400-800 push/pull selective)-treble], active/passive switch, bridge volume, neck volume. New EQ has brought a life to the bass. I like the way OBP3 works in bass and middle frequencies. 40hz bass and 800hz middle boost are perfect for this bass to produce the tone I am willing to hear. Plus the electrical noise problem is no more. But the distorted sound was still coming when I crank the EQ.
According to a few luthiers, my bass had that kind of torsion on the neck probably because of the wet wood they used when they were manifacturing the bass. The solution was to remove all the frets, level and flatten the keyboard and reinstall frets. So my luthier did all the job, except installing new frets. It's fretless now and the buzzing is gone.
I removed the bridge to smallest parts of it, WD40'ed and dried them with a paper towel, installed back. Bridge works properly now.
The last thing I did on the bass is, changing the pickups. I saw a video on Youtube, a guy reviewing "Aguilar Super Single" pickups and liked it. Bought a set online and installed them with my luthier. They replaced Bartolini mk1's which comes along with the bass. It has a middle and bass oriented mellow, warm sound and a little higher output —I think! The only thing looked like a problem at first, was the whereabouts of bobbin tops which aren't at the same place as my strings. The string spacing was 16 mm on my bass but 18 mm on these pickups. So when the third string was on the spot, first was a little below and the fifth was above the head of the bobbin. I thought I made a mistake but there was no other option when buying the pickup. So I realized it's not being a problem.
Now I'm happy with the result. I'd like to put some recordings of it soon. I hope my experience will be helpful to somebody.
