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Modified an EB Sterling, and I love it!

jazzyitalian

jazzyitalian

Supporting Member
Mar 3, 2005
1,881
1,163
Minneapolis, MN
Disclosures
Lawyer and Hobbist Bass Maker
#1
I've been looking for another Sterling S/H to have as a second to my current one. EB hasn't made a 2 pickup single / Humbucker since 2012 or 13 I think.

Gave up looking for a second Sterling S/H after several months. So decided to buy a mint condition 2003 regular model and modify it. Could not re-wire the preamp using the existing pickup and a single neck pickup. There were some real hurdles and putting in a 5 blade was only one of those issues.

So I decided to get a stingray type pickup which would allow for a parallel wiring only into the blade a simple pickup switch not between coils, but amongst the pickups. The lever would be like any other traditional two pickup guitar or bass. (Neck - Both - Bridge).

Next... Finding the right pickups. I turned to Andrea at Manne who has built basses with these kinds of pickups. But he prefers ceramic over alnico or neodymium.

So off I went to buy the pickups from the group that makes Manne's fat pole pickups. Half way around the world and 6 weeks later, the pickups arrived.

I love the sound and the out put ratings are close to the Ernie Ball OEM's. The Humbucker is humcancelling. The single neck pickup is not. But it's faint hum is tolerable. I would say these ceramic pickups Manne uses are a bit more open sounding requiring less output from the tone controls. Easy enough to get used to.

The end result looks like this. Decided to cut up another plain white PG. I'll try to get around to putting up a sound clip later. But the tone is a bomb. I love it.
 

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#7
mrperkolator said:
Also…. Who made the pickups? I can find alinco version at stewmac but not ceramic.
Click to expand...
So the parent company that makes the pickups is called Woosung Chorus Industries. They have historically made and sold ONLY to commercial customers. But recently, (and by recently I mean literally these past year) they started selling to consumers. They maintain 2 websites and you need to pay attention to what I am about to mention... One site is for commercial customers and you'll know this because they have minimum order requirements of 10 units per product type. Partsland That's not the site you want. The other site for consumers has a smaller selection of their products. So go to this site for the MM humbucker: theguitarparts.com (They have both Alnico and Ceramic)

Their consumer site wasn't working as it should for me when I tried placing an order back in July. But they may have fixed that by now. My initial order wouldn't process because it wouldn't accept my payment. So I had to email them directly. What they did was email me an invoice with their paypal email address to send payment. The MM Humbuckers can be bought on the consumer site. The single coil fat pole pickups cannot. Those are only sold on the commercial site and again you'd have to buy 10 of them if you wanted just one.

I was lucky when I got my single because Andreas from Manne agreed to sell me one of his single ceramic pickups. But he is not going to sell anymore of these to anyone else. He's keeping them as replacements for his bass customers. He did it as a favor probably because he knows I own two of his basses.

I'm assuming that you've done a thorough internet search. So you'll likely have to buy the alnicos single from StewMac. By the way, PartsLand does sell Alnico MM pick-ups. They're also great. So you can still have them match up. It just would be an alnico pair and not ceramic. That's not the end of the world by any stretch.

I'll send you a PM as well. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Jeff
 
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#8
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#11
definenredefine said:
So...can I ask why you didn't start with Stingray HH? Might have saved from having to replace the electronics and route a new pickup cavity...
Click to expand...
Well EB still makes the Sterlings as HH as well. So there was that option... But to your question, I prefer the sterling body over the sting ray body, and I prefer the single pick-up over the Humbucker on the neck.
 
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#13
bassclef112 said:
Nice work! I modded my '94 with different guts as well. Doesn't look to happen very often. I wanted something different so I put in a Lane Poor MM and an Aguilar OBP-3. Absolutely wonderful!
Click to expand...
I only used different pickups. I stayed with the original EB Sterling pre-amp. You can't go wrong with Lane Poor. They're becoming so rare these days. I bet you bass sounds great!
 
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#14
I got the pickup direct from Lane when he was in full production and I already had a couple of OBP-3's in other basses and liked them. No regrets.
I will say this though. One of the best mods I did was adding a finger rest between the top of the pickup and the neck. For me, without the neck pu, it's a must have.
You got a really good looking bass there!!

P.S. I had the Sterling, and then managed to acquire a '62 Jazz. It felt very familiar, and I realized it felt exactly like my Sterling. The profiles were identical. I love it.
STERLING_CU.jpg
 
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#15
darwin-bass said:
So, not Delano pickups then? I've looked for a single coil J to add to my 'Ray and the Delano is the only one I've found that has the 4 big poles.
Click to expand...
I asked Woosung Chorus if they would ever sell their single coil fat poles on the consumer facing site and they replied that they will. They said there was a process in moving product types over. Likely has to do with production schedules and order processing. Check the site periodically and you'll see them added at some point. The outline of the pickup they make is the same as fender jazz. So jazz pick up routing templates will work.
 

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