Help me with a quick and dirty series wiring mod

Disconnecting the bridge hot and the neck ground, then soldering them together, should do what you want with minimal effort. Your second knob will not do anything in this state, FYI.

 

You'd get more responses if you had this in the Pickups & Electronics sub-forum.



Courtesy of TB member WalterW

 

Any diagram for a Fender Jazz bass mod will work on an SX so that lives lots of diagrams out there.

MY personal favorite for live playing on an SX is a rotary switch (in place of the second volume). It goes neck only, neck and bridge in series, neck and bridge in parallel. Bridge only and mute. Gives several nice steps in tone with no volume knobs to twiddle except master volume. I also do the series/parallel switch in vol/blend but the blend doesn't seem to work well in series mode.

 

For the record, and as someone who's rather inept with a soldering gun and wiring, here's my solution.

 

Wire the bass EXACTLY like a P-bass.

 

Oops, I missed the part about wanting to wire it with only one volume control.

 

somebody please try my revised idea, series with V/T/T!

in series you can turn down one tone and the other pickup stays bright; this means the tones act like a pickup switch, but just for the high end, while the low end stays on and keeps the series bass boost. turn down both tones and it's like a regular tone control.

 

I didn't use that exact diagram but I've done it and that works, I used a three position switch in place of the tone, I think that it will only work to cut the highs independently on the grounded pickup but I could be wrong. It's a wonderful mod tho. Lots of versatility. With two caps it's like a frequency switchable bass boost.

 

no, you can totally make it cut highs on either pickup.

 

By connecting the tone control across the pickup leads? Would the series resistance of the second pickup make it so that the tone couldn't be rolled all the way off like a grease bucket tone control? I've never had need of two independent treble cuts so I haven't thought much about it. I've used it on individual coils of humbuckers and to roll off the neck pickup and keep the cut of the bridge pickup, I'm not a big fan of the tone of bridge pickups by themselves.

 

This is a great idea, and I would like to do this to my SX J.

I see you have two caps on there. Can they be different, or should they match? Also, any particular reason for 500K pots instead of 250K?

 

as near as i can tell, the same thing happens with either pickup; rolling off its tone knob puts the cap across its leads, essentially shorting out its high end frequencies.

 

So one might put the 0.1 cap on the neck pickup and the 0.05 on the bridge to accentuate the characteristics of each... maybe, I dunno

 

Yes that's a possible application of it, although a .1 on the neck and a .022 on the bridge would probably be a better combination.

 

i found .1μF caps to do the best job of clearly "switching" the highs between one pickup or the other; smaller values just had too small of an effect, it seemed to end up still sounding like both pickups when turned down.

the neat thing is, turn both tones down and now the caps are in series, which means their value halves. dumping both tones effectively gives you a .05μF cap working on a humbucker, which works out just about right for a deep dark tone.

 

So I was trying to figure out how the vtt mod worked and I think I noticed something interesting but I'm not sure if I'm right, if you use a small value cap like a .01uf in parallel with one coil/pickup, would it roll off the bass from the other pickup?