Hey All,
It's lockdown, and at home I only have a Mexican built Fender Mustang Bass to hand; I wanted to see how diverse I could make this bass - so I went down a lockdown rabbit hole of looking into how guitar wiring works! Anyway I am absolutely delighted with the result of modifying it, so I thought it might be helpful to share my slight crazy wiring diagram along with an explanation of what it's doing.
The original bass had fender standard p-j style pups, a master volume pot, a paster tone pot, and a 3 way selector switch for the pickups.
My modified bass has the following:
1) Changed out pups for Lindy Fralin P-J set
2) Changed volume for a stacked pot, so that both pickups now have volume control. the stacked pots are 500k and 250k - I like my p-bass a little harsher, but not 500k harsh, so I have modified this down to around a 330k pot with a 1mg resistor.
3) I have put kinsman style treble bleeds across both volume pots, so that they are better able to blend
4) The tone knob also has a push pull switch, which changes the bass from parallel to series.
5) I have changed the toggle switch to a free-way 6 position toggle switch. Switching this up and down determines which combination of pickups will be affected by the tone knob - switching this from side to side switches the tone pot from a 0.047uf tone cap to a 0.1uf tone cap
One idiosyncrasy of the circuit I have created, is that the volume pots will change the way they interact when the 0.1uf tone cap is selected in the middle position (i.e. tone set to adjust both bridge and neck pickups). This is because I could not find a way to have this middle position of the switch on the 0.1uf tone cap side to use the output from the volumes when sending to this tone cap. If anyone can think of a way of wiring the free-way switch so that this is possible, I would love to know - as it would be my preferred configuration. In the top left of the wiring diagram I created I have also put the free-way switch schematic.
This bass now sounds absolutely incredible, and is also extremely diverse. I have attached the wiring diagram for anyone interested.
One final note of caution on anyone wanting to attempt this, there is very little space available in the mustang - the tone caps I used needed to be placed in the gully between the switch and the pots in order to fit this all in, and it is still extremely tight - you must therefore be super neat with how you wire it up!
Love to hear anyones thoughts on this!
It's lockdown, and at home I only have a Mexican built Fender Mustang Bass to hand; I wanted to see how diverse I could make this bass - so I went down a lockdown rabbit hole of looking into how guitar wiring works! Anyway I am absolutely delighted with the result of modifying it, so I thought it might be helpful to share my slight crazy wiring diagram along with an explanation of what it's doing.
The original bass had fender standard p-j style pups, a master volume pot, a paster tone pot, and a 3 way selector switch for the pickups.
My modified bass has the following:
1) Changed out pups for Lindy Fralin P-J set
2) Changed volume for a stacked pot, so that both pickups now have volume control. the stacked pots are 500k and 250k - I like my p-bass a little harsher, but not 500k harsh, so I have modified this down to around a 330k pot with a 1mg resistor.
3) I have put kinsman style treble bleeds across both volume pots, so that they are better able to blend
4) The tone knob also has a push pull switch, which changes the bass from parallel to series.
5) I have changed the toggle switch to a free-way 6 position toggle switch. Switching this up and down determines which combination of pickups will be affected by the tone knob - switching this from side to side switches the tone pot from a 0.047uf tone cap to a 0.1uf tone cap
One idiosyncrasy of the circuit I have created, is that the volume pots will change the way they interact when the 0.1uf tone cap is selected in the middle position (i.e. tone set to adjust both bridge and neck pickups). This is because I could not find a way to have this middle position of the switch on the 0.1uf tone cap side to use the output from the volumes when sending to this tone cap. If anyone can think of a way of wiring the free-way switch so that this is possible, I would love to know - as it would be my preferred configuration. In the top left of the wiring diagram I created I have also put the free-way switch schematic.
This bass now sounds absolutely incredible, and is also extremely diverse. I have attached the wiring diagram for anyone interested.
One final note of caution on anyone wanting to attempt this, there is very little space available in the mustang - the tone caps I used needed to be placed in the gully between the switch and the pots in order to fit this all in, and it is still extremely tight - you must therefore be super neat with how you wire it up!
Love to hear anyones thoughts on this!
