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Emergency wiring problem

SwamiRob

SwamiRob

Aug 23, 2007
2,151
33
Scarborough, N. Yorks, England
#1
Going in the studio on Monday and I need to get my bass in order pretty desperately, so if anyone can help out that'd be great.

I'm running a bridge humbucker with a stacked jazz and it's setup a little strangely, probably easiest if I make a list to explain things.

*Have a stacked balance/tone knob and no other controls
*The balance knob goes from humbucker in series->jazz->humbucker in parallel
*The tone knob seems to only effect the jazz pickup and also goes from the sound you'd expect with a tone control off to rolling all the lower end and then midrange off.
*The circuit has a capacitor in it wired in-between the tone element of the stack and the balance
*The humbucker seems to only be wired straight to the jack
*The jack is a 3 pin design
*When I play even a slight amount of force there is really nasty clipping, there's no way of taking the jazz pickup completely out the circuit, but the effect is still pretty nasty even when the signal is mostly humbucker - obviously this is the most important thing that needs getting rid of

Obviously there's a fair few problems with the wiring, I'm not too sure but I'm guessing the clipping might be due to the jazz pickup being out of phase which can obviously be easily rectified, but the other stuff I really don't have much of a clue. Also I'm not too sure how much of a role the capacitor has in the equation, my understanding is they were just used for tone shaping in passive circuits.

If anyone could give me a diagram/instructions of how to wire my bass to have a pretty straightforward setup, where I have the balance between my jazz and the humbucker in parallel (that's the one that's louder and deeper right?) with an overall volume control that'd be great. If a dual volume setup is easier that might be better.

Cheers!
 
#4
Nope, no volume, it's a step up from when I was running the thing passive to start with when I had the humbucker wired straight to the jack anyway :p There are 3 other pots but they're all hardwired to the pre I'm not using.

Got my Fender Bullet as backup but my ATK is much more fitting really, not to mention how compressed the thing gets when you play hard. As much as I'd love to get a tech guy involved I probably can't afford it, also considering it's something I can probably wire myself I'd rather do that if possible.
 
#6
I'm a bit confused on what you are trying to do?

"*The balance knob goes from humbucker in series->jazz->humbucker in parallel"

That isn't the way a blend control works. It would go from one pickup to the other only. Any series/parallel options would be done with a separate switch.

"*The humbucker seems to only be wired straight to the jack"
But that contradicts the above statement?

"*The jack is a 3 pin design"
That would either indicate active electronics of some sort, or dual outputs, otherwise it is unnecessary.

Tell me how you want it to be wired and I can draw you a diagram.
 
#8
Right I've had a really thorough look round today and some of what I said was completely wrong; The jack is just a simple 2 way design, it looked kinda complicated cos it had a couple of notches to solder things on with a little more easily but the whole section was just 1 piece & there was a feed going to the blend control from the humbucker after all, there's quite alot of black cables involved and I mustn't of followed them properly. Didn't think that made much sense.

As far as the balance control goes I'm a little confused because the control did seem to go from sounding very loud and deep to being pretty much the jazz pickup soloed back to the humbucker again but sounding a little more nasal without quite as much volume or low end.

I stripped everything off the pots though to simply wire both pickups to the jack which seems to have made the whole thing clearer, to be honest I'd rather the thing was just solidly wired and getting a nice clear output so that doesn't bother me a great deal. One thing that's maintained though is the distortion coming from the jazz pickup, everything sounds very nice till I dig in, also if a string hits the poles from the jazz pickup the whole circuit mutes when it occurs. Not too much of a problem when I lower the jazz pickup pretty considerably because obviously the string doesn't go anywhere near, but the distortion is still there to some extent. The guy that wired the thing up for me in the first place took it back off me when I told him that there was distortion and he put a cap on the the circuit (which is 473M or something obscure) to tone it down a bit which seemed to work a little but it hasn't really gone entirely and the whole thing sounds like a hard clipped mess when played with any force. I've tried messing with inverting the phase of the jazz pickup and it doesn't seem to make any/much difference which is a little odd too.

All I was asking for in the first post was a way of wiring it up so my controls were just blend/volume or volume/volume by the way, sorry if that wasn't clear. Cheers for the help so far, it'd be an absolute lifesaver if I can get this sorted out properly.
 
#9
SwamiRob said:
Right I've had a really thorough look round today and some of what I said was completely wrong; The jack is just a simple 2 way design, it looked kinda complicated cos it had a couple of notches to solder things on with a little more easily but the whole section was just 1 piece & there was a feed going to the blend control from the humbucker after all, there's quite alot of black cables involved and I mustn't of followed them properly. Didn't think that made much sense.

As far as the balance control goes I'm a little confused because the control did seem to go from sounding very loud and deep to being pretty much the jazz pickup soloed back to the humbucker again but sounding a little more nasal without quite as much volume or low end.

I stripped everything off the pots though to simply wire both pickups to the jack which seems to have made the whole thing clearer, to be honest I'd rather the thing was just solidly wired and getting a nice clear output so that doesn't bother me a great deal. One thing that's maintained though is the distortion coming from the jazz pickup, everything sounds very nice till I dig in, also if a string hits the poles from the jazz pickup the whole circuit mutes when it occurs. Not too much of a problem when I lower the jazz pickup pretty considerably because obviously the string doesn't go anywhere near, but the distortion is still there to some extent. The guy that wired the thing up for me in the first place took it back off me when I told him that there was distortion and he put a cap on the the circuit (which is 473M or something obscure) to tone it down a bit which seemed to work a little but it hasn't really gone entirely and the whole thing sounds like a hard clipped mess when played with any force. I've tried messing with inverting the phase of the jazz pickup and it doesn't seem to make any/much difference which is a little odd too.

All I was asking for in the first post was a way of wiring it up so my controls were just blend/volume or volume/volume by the way, sorry if that wasn't clear. Cheers for the help so far, it'd be an absolute lifesaver if I can get this sorted out properly.
Click to expand...

As far as the output is being muted when the string touches the pole pieces: Perhaps you have the pole pieces grounded, but the pickup polarity of the pickup is wrong, so that the pole pieces are actually connected to the output instead of ground?
You might want to check out the pickup and see how it's hooked up.

So you just want a volume control and a blend control only, with no tone or any other switches?
 
#10
Yeah just a balance and a master volume would be great. I'll try playing with my jazz pickup again at some point, I think I might have soldered the earthing for the jazz to the hot output when I flipped the polarity. Have you got any idea what might be causing this distortion? Might it just be a simple case of the pickup not being able to deal with a high input?
 
#11
Have you tried emailing the guy who made your bassculture pup?
He may have a wiring diagram for what you want to do since that's his business and you are already a customer of his.
 
#12
Oh yeah he told me how to wire the thing, but that was how to wire it with the ATK pre-amp and the 3 way pickup selector, neither of which I use. It's the Jazz pickup that's giving me the most hassle really, the humbucker sounds great, I can always just use the humbucker by itself if I really have to but it'd be nice to get this Jazz pickup working after paying quite a bit for it, plus I'm not gonna be recording with the thing for a while either.
 
#13
SwamiRob said:
Oh yeah he told me how to wire the thing, but that was how to wire it with the ATK pre-amp and the 3 way pickup selector, neither of which I use. It's the Jazz pickup that's giving me the most hassle really, the humbucker sounds great, I can always just use the humbucker by itself if I really have to but it'd be nice to get this Jazz pickup working after paying quite a bit for it, plus I'm not gonna be recording with the thing for a while either.
Click to expand...

Didn't PaganJack wire in a Jazz pup? I think he still used the ATK pup and the 3 way, but took out the preamp and put in a blend, IIRC. Maybe he'll have some ideas from his experience that could help you out. Wish I could be of more help. Sorry.
 
#14
SwamiRob said:
Yeah just a balance and a master volume would be great. I'll try playing with my jazz pickup again at some point, I think I might have soldered the earthing for the jazz to the hot output when I flipped the polarity. Have you got any idea what might be causing this distortion? Might it just be a simple case of the pickup not being able to deal with a high input?
Click to expand...

Ok, if you want to use this Seymour Duncan diagram, you can just skip the tone control.

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
 
#18
SwamiRob said:
No the Jazz pickup itself seems to distort in a pretty unpleasant way, it's kinda like the horrible compression you get when you play hard with weak or badly made pickups but much much worse.
Click to expand...

Is it too close to the strings? Passive pickups can't distort. All they can do is overdrive an active stage. Distortion is caused when you exceed the headroom available, and the tops of the waves square off. But pickups have unlimited headroom. They only put out what they put out. They have no voltage rail to contend with.

Also, under wound (weak) pickups will sound cleaner. It's the over wound stuff that sounds compressed.

You might be getting magnetic wolf tones from having the pickups too close. This is common with rod magnet poles.

It also be from bad solder joints.

What kind of pickups are they?
 
#19
It's a Seymour Duncan stacked Jazz humbucker, I've lowered it hell of alot to be honest already, I think the poles are probably a good 5mm under my strings at the moment. When you mention soldering do you mean the wiring from the coil to the wiring coming out of it or just in the entire circuit, I'm not the most proficient of soldering iron users but even when I connected the pickup straight to the jack to test it that way I had the same problem.

There is one wire underneath the thing though which is a little odd, the bottom of the pickup there's a foil coating, and there's a bare piece of wire from one edge to the other in the middle that's soldered in place on either side. I can't recall exactly but the wire came lose from one of the solder joints and after soldering it back in place it seemed to make an improvement in sound.
 
#20
The wire underneath is probably a ground wire for the foil.

What amp are you using, and how do you have the input gain set? It sounds like you have the input volume too high.

Those stacked Jazz pickups are not very high output. That pickup have 4-conductor wiring, right? How do you have it wired up? It should be black to hot, green to ground, and the red and white together.

You can also try it in parallel, which is red and black to hot, and white and green to ground. That will lower the output and reduce the mids.

If it's not wires up like either of those, change it to the first one and see what you get.
 

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