Hey y'all. I'm new here, so please excuse me if I'm posting this in the wrong spot, or should've found a thread to add on to. I'm just very excited about my latest and largest-to-date instrument mod. 
I turned this bass into a bass VI!
Now, if someone was going looking for a mod platform to turn into a bass VI, I wouldn't necessarily recommend they buy an AGB200 specifically for that task. However, I've had this bass for years, I've wanted a bass VI for years, I'm a sucker for anything with f-holes, and I didn't know of anywhere to find a semi-hollow bass VI even if I could afford such a thing. (I've since found out about the Duane Eddy signature VI that Gretsch just released, but point two of that issue still stands). In the last few years, I've become much more of a guitar player than I ever really was a bass player, so the new setup has really breathed life back into a beautiful instrument that I'd pretty much been neglecting. I also realized that I already had most of the parts I'd need already lying around from various other projects. tuners, bridge, pots/wiring, and even the Bigsby!
So, I filled in the tuner holes and redrilled the headstock for guitar tuners. then i filled those holes and did it again because they were all over the heckin place. Measure twice etc etc. One still ended up a little off, as you can see below. Used black nail polish to cover up the dowels where the old tuners used to be. With more wet-sanding and polishing, I think I could get this looking basically as good as it did before I got my grubby lil mitts on it. As it stands, it's not ~too~ bad from a distance. This is what it looks like at the moment:
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The bridge is a base I had lying around with a tunomatic I also had lying around...this will probably be the first candidate for upgrade if and when I can sink any more money into this bad boi. The posts are actually spaced wrong for the tunomatic, but I cut up a couple of those plastic wall screw anchors to shim it up and it seems stable enough. The neck angle isn't reeeeaaaalllyyy quite right to accomodate the archtop-style bridge, so I've had to sand it down a good bit. I ended up removing the thumbwheels just to get it down to a playable action. I'd like to put those back on, so I'll probably take it off, try to mark off a decent facsimile of the arch of the top and cut it down with a dremel, then re-sand to get the fit right. Though honestly at this point, i might be better off getting a small strip of wood and just trying to fashion my own base from scratch.
This initially just had master tone, master volume and a switch for electronics. I completely rewired it from scratch, drilled holes for two new pots, and did the whole thing up with volumes for each pickup, master treble and master bass cut.
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The original pickups were mini-humbuckers, so the body was already routed in a way that would fit p90s, and I love p90s, so that was a no-brainer. The artcore mini-hums are kinda weird though, in that the actual pickup itself was the size of a p90, with a standard style humbucker ring that then went around that, so it left weird gaps on either side where the adjustment screws had sat, along with screwholes for the mount itself. So that led me to design and cut my own pickguard! I had never done anything like that before, which probably shows in the finished product here, but i am pretty proud of it nonetheless. I bought a bracket for it to mount to the side as on other semihollows, but screwing it down into the leftover pickup ring holes, it doesn't seem to really need any support on that side, so that's one hole I can keep from drilling in this poor bb
I was able to find beefy enough plain steel strings from Stringjoy that i thought, hey, why not use plain for the top three? might play more like a regular-scale guitar that way. Big mistake, though, as all three plain strings have awful, dissonant overtones when played anywhere at the 12 fret or above. I tried damping the strings behind the bridge, messing with the action, lowering the pickups all the way etc, with no results so I figured it must be the unwounded-ness of the strings causing it somehow. Last night I was able to swap out the third string for a wound one from a different set i had lying around and it confirmed my suspicion, so now i've got an all-wound set on the way.
So there's still some tweaking left to be done on the setup, but overall I'm already enamored of the way it plays and sounds.
I turned this bass into a bass VI!
Now, if someone was going looking for a mod platform to turn into a bass VI, I wouldn't necessarily recommend they buy an AGB200 specifically for that task. However, I've had this bass for years, I've wanted a bass VI for years, I'm a sucker for anything with f-holes, and I didn't know of anywhere to find a semi-hollow bass VI even if I could afford such a thing. (I've since found out about the Duane Eddy signature VI that Gretsch just released, but point two of that issue still stands). In the last few years, I've become much more of a guitar player than I ever really was a bass player, so the new setup has really breathed life back into a beautiful instrument that I'd pretty much been neglecting. I also realized that I already had most of the parts I'd need already lying around from various other projects. tuners, bridge, pots/wiring, and even the Bigsby!
So, I filled in the tuner holes and redrilled the headstock for guitar tuners. then i filled those holes and did it again because they were all over the heckin place. Measure twice etc etc. One still ended up a little off, as you can see below. Used black nail polish to cover up the dowels where the old tuners used to be. With more wet-sanding and polishing, I think I could get this looking basically as good as it did before I got my grubby lil mitts on it. As it stands, it's not ~too~ bad from a distance. This is what it looks like at the moment:
Invalid Link Removed
The bridge is a base I had lying around with a tunomatic I also had lying around...this will probably be the first candidate for upgrade if and when I can sink any more money into this bad boi. The posts are actually spaced wrong for the tunomatic, but I cut up a couple of those plastic wall screw anchors to shim it up and it seems stable enough. The neck angle isn't reeeeaaaalllyyy quite right to accomodate the archtop-style bridge, so I've had to sand it down a good bit. I ended up removing the thumbwheels just to get it down to a playable action. I'd like to put those back on, so I'll probably take it off, try to mark off a decent facsimile of the arch of the top and cut it down with a dremel, then re-sand to get the fit right. Though honestly at this point, i might be better off getting a small strip of wood and just trying to fashion my own base from scratch.
This initially just had master tone, master volume and a switch for electronics. I completely rewired it from scratch, drilled holes for two new pots, and did the whole thing up with volumes for each pickup, master treble and master bass cut.
Invalid Link Removed
The original pickups were mini-humbuckers, so the body was already routed in a way that would fit p90s, and I love p90s, so that was a no-brainer. The artcore mini-hums are kinda weird though, in that the actual pickup itself was the size of a p90, with a standard style humbucker ring that then went around that, so it left weird gaps on either side where the adjustment screws had sat, along with screwholes for the mount itself. So that led me to design and cut my own pickguard! I had never done anything like that before, which probably shows in the finished product here, but i am pretty proud of it nonetheless. I bought a bracket for it to mount to the side as on other semihollows, but screwing it down into the leftover pickup ring holes, it doesn't seem to really need any support on that side, so that's one hole I can keep from drilling in this poor bb
I was able to find beefy enough plain steel strings from Stringjoy that i thought, hey, why not use plain for the top three? might play more like a regular-scale guitar that way. Big mistake, though, as all three plain strings have awful, dissonant overtones when played anywhere at the 12 fret or above. I tried damping the strings behind the bridge, messing with the action, lowering the pickups all the way etc, with no results so I figured it must be the unwounded-ness of the strings causing it somehow. Last night I was able to swap out the third string for a wound one from a different set i had lying around and it confirmed my suspicion, so now i've got an all-wound set on the way.
So there's still some tweaking left to be done on the setup, but overall I'm already enamored of the way it plays and sounds.
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I'm a sucker for nonstandard tunings.
