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Mystery Warwick Preamp

L

low on toner

Apr 27, 2008
40
1
Saint Paul, Minnesota
#1
I have a 1996 5-string Corvette std. with MEC "Dynamic Correction" pickups and an active preamp. The bass sounds awesome unplugged (bubinga with wenge neck and fretboard) and I love playing it, but the electronics are muddy and really aren't to the level of the rest of the instrument.

It has a very weird preamp arrangement that may not be(probably isn't) stock (the stock knobs are missing, replaced with cheap black plastic). Front to back It has a volume knob (not push/pull), a pickup blend knob, and a two pot bass/treble boost/cut knob with a detent. That knob has an exposed circuit board that is about 3/4 inch by 1 inch. There is no writing on anything that I can see. The wiring doesn't correspond to anything I can find on the web, at Warwick or by searching this site.

When the battery dies, the bass goes dead, though my understanding is these are passive pickups.

Any ideas?
 
#5
The BTC "Control" is different from the BTC "System."

Both are based on the 2-band, stacked knob circuit. The BTC "Control" includes the BTC pot and can be used with any brand of pickup.
The BTC "System" (the one that says "for EMG pickups only") is a prewired harness with the BTC pot, volume, and blend. The "system" is specified only for EMG pickups as it is wired specifically for the EMG "Quik-Connect" solderless connection.

If your bass has the BTC and the stock MEC pickups, it's going to be the BTC "Control," not "System."
 
#7
It is actually all of the parts of the BTC "System", it is wired in such a bizzare manner, I can hardly believe it even works at all. The only wires coming directly from the pickups are soldered to the case of the blend pot (the one from the BTC system that has a pcb board). These are tied in to two white wires on the blend pcb. An unshielded wire ties the blend and volume cases, the shield of the 1/4 phone plug, and an unshielded wire which I presume leads to the bridge and then the pickups. This thing is all messed up, and I'm embarrassed I didn't look closer at it before.
 
#8
Wait... I think the pots could be MEC pots, not EMG, which would be more logical as MEC and Warwick work together. MEC makes some printed circuit boards to simplify their wiring, for example you can see an MEC preamp system with a stacked Bass/treble pot with PCB:
Invalid Link Removed

If the bass goes dead with the battery, it's because there's no push/pull switch to the volume pot (note that on the picture above, the volume pot is push/pull) and as a consequence the signal always goes through the active electronics.
 
#10
Wow,

Well I was wrong and thank you, thank you for the knowledgeable responses. What a disaster I had.

The blend pot is the original MEC part, the on/off volume pot is a cheap replacement without the push/pull on/off, the preamp is the EMG BTC control and none of it was properly wired (as described above). They probably pulled out the MEC volume pot because they couldn't figure out how to wire it....

So. Now I've got to figure out what I am going to do to fix all of it.
 
#11
Ah the bird's nest. Have fun fixing that!
I had a bass once that someone tried installing a BC Rich preamp circuit into. Tried and failed. Picture this:

Invalid Link Removed

with about 6 inches total in extra wire jammed inside the cavity, and nothing wired correctly.
I gave up trying to fix it, ripped the whole thing out, and replaced it with a simple, passive, 2 volume/2 tone.
 
#12
low on toner said:
I have a 1996 5-string Corvette std. with MEC "Dynamic Correction" pickups and an active preamp. The bass sounds awesome unplugged (bubinga with wenge neck and fretboard) and I love playing it, but the electronics are muddy and really aren't to the level of the rest of the instrument.
Click to expand...

I had exactly the same problem on my Warwick Steamer Stage II. Expensive bass, sounded fantastic unplugged, but MEC pickups and preamp strangled the natural sound. I solved it very quickly, I changed MEC to original Kent Armstrong hand made pickups and K.A. MM3 preamp. After the change my Warwick sonically "exploded" :hyper:
(I´m not able to describe the difference better way:)
 
#13
DeepHeepBass said:
I had exactly the same problem on my Warwick Steamer Stage II. Expensive bass, sounded fantastic unplugged, but MEC pickups and preamp strangled the natural sound. I solved it very quickly, I changed MEC to original Kent Armstrong hand made pickups and K.A. MM3 preamp. After the change my Warwick sonically "exploded" :hyper:
(I´m not able to describe the difference better way:)
Click to expand...

I pulled everything out. Shielded the tone control cavity, pickup cavities and pickup lead paths with copper film (fun! not....), it really looks nice and clean in there now. Probably overkill, but once you have everything apart, might as well take the extra hours to do it. I'm using the original passive MEC pickups for now and bought new pots and an Aquilar OBP-2 preamp to replace the poorly-soldered bird's nest. Will test that out, if that doesn't knock my socks off I will upgrade the pickups, probably to the Delano JMVC 5 FE. I could have used the Bartolini preamp, but it is a lot bigger and looked like it might take up alot of space inside that small cavity, especially if I want to use it 18 volts. Plus, it's a lot more complicated to wire and I'm lazy.
 
#14
This is an old thread.... I finally replaced the crap MEC pickups with Delano JC5 HE5 pickups from Best Bass Gear, who convinced me to use these rather than the JMVC 5 FE, which are apparently characteristically bright colored, since I told them I wanted a pickup that would get out of the way of the bass and just be accurate and flexible for multiple playing styles.

Gotta say that this guitar now (using D'Addario Chrome XL flats) sounds better than I could have ever hoped. Everything I had tried before with amps and effects and fiddling with knobs, comes straight out of the guitar without messing around. If I want it to sound clean, clean, just like it does without amplification, it will do that. If I want a deep overdrive sound, it will do that too. If I want warm it will do warm, if I want crisp, it will do crisp. The low b sounds like moons crashing. The tone is even between each string without a major jump in tonal response between strings. And all of this it will do while being bone quiet (thanks to the shielding and rewiring, but also the pickups themselves).

I haven't even bothered to put batteries in the preamp! I'm done. I never have to screw with this thing again, except change strings occasionally....
 
#15
Papazita said:
Ah the bird's nest. Have fun fixing that!
I had a bass once that someone tried installing a BC Rich preamp circuit into. Tried and failed. Picture this:

Invalid Link Removed

with about 6 inches total in extra wire jammed inside the cavity, and nothing wired correctly.
I gave up trying to fix it, ripped the whole thing out, and replaced it with a simple, passive, 2 volume/2 tone.
Click to expand...

do you still have it?
 

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