A few weeks ago I picked up a like new Ibanez Artcore AGB 140 bass. It is the thin hollow body with F holes and a single pichup.
The instrument is beautiful and really easy to play, but the sound was not too exciting, very middy, and the tone control seemed to do nearly nothing. It did not cut the sound, it just changed it a little.
I expected that it was perhaps miswired or a wire broken loose, so I took all the controls out and found it perfectly wired in the same manner as a standard P bass. Meanwhile I find that another TBer has the same problem, and as I did some 'Net research - many others as well!
At the urging of 62bass here who has the same problem, I spent a good afternoon checking, measuring and double-checking everything, and the only thing I could find that seemed weird was that the DC resistance of the pickup seemed very low - around 1.4K Ohms instead of the usual 10-15K. I happened to have another of these same pickups in my part drawer, and measured that one, and wow! it was also 1.4K ! This is very strange.
I drew up a schematic and sent it to my genius engineer, and he said that the pup impedance was so low, that it would not work properly with the standard 500K pots and 0.05 Cap!
I ordered 2 x 50K pots and installed them with the 0.22 cap he suggested and voila! The bass sounds MUCH better and the tone control WORKS! My guess is that some engineer at Ibanez had the thought to design a low-impedance pup to reduce noise, but somehow the production engineers did not get the word, and used the same pots and cap as usual. Evidently Ibanez continued to make them WRONG for the entire production life of the product. They probably did not sell well for this exact problem.
The other possible fix is to replace the pup, which was reccommended by my engineer. He says no one has every made a good low-impedance pickup. I checked out the Bartolini M34C-B - this seems the one to get, and I found a review of it that was glowing. AND - guess where the reviewer put it - in an ARTCORE BASS!!! Too strange. See the review here - [Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
ANYWAY - if you have one of these fine basses, you can increase the sound quality by a huge factor by changing the pots and cap or the pickup and have a completely different bass.
