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Removing tone controls from bass

#21
thunderbird66 said:
I absolutely love this......I've been thinkin about doing something like this for a while now.
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I keep going back and forth on this. So In the spirit of making a decision I will continue the experiment.

Jazz pickups - each with an independent volume control and a treble roll-off ( I would love input on this) - and - I want to wire it to 2 different jacks - one mono-(combined with both pickups) and one stereo - Rick style - neck pickup and bridge pickup to 2 leads on a stereo jack
feeding 2 individual amps. In this case a gk mb200 through 2-12 neo eminence sealed cab and gk mb200 through 1-15 eminence ported cab.

Fire away!
 
#22
morgansterne said:
I've done this on both one bass and one (treble?) guitar. This was just some experimenting I did in the course of repairs. In both cases it made the sound brighter, in the case of the bass it seemed to make the signal louder as well.

Not worth it though, I think. Volume and tone knobs on bass are necessary for switching between fingers and pick, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

This makes sense as well
 
#23
line6man said:
How much difference you will hear depends largely on the impedance of the pickups, the value of the pot, and the frequency cutoff of the filter. In some cases, there is no perceptible difference, but in others, there is an extreme difference.

It would help if you specified the value of the tone control. If it is 250k, there will be a noticeable difference. If it is 500k, there probably won't be much difference.

As a side note, a 500k pot on "10" is a bypassed 250k pot, and a 500k pot on "8-ish" for audio taper or "5" for linear taper is a 250k pot on "10."
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Back in the mid late 70's I changed out my jazz bass pots to Bourne pots 250 K 7844M I am reusing them in this build -
 
#25
Someone's already thought of this. Behold, the Fender 'no load' pot:

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You could also use a push-pull switch and bypass the volume and tone controls entirely, there's a guitar wired this way (I can't remember who makes it, derp) they call it the 'turbo' switch.
 
#26
My 1994 Warwick Fortress One 5-string (German) is set up this way from the factory. When you push the volume knob in you get tone control over the two pickups. When it's pulled out you have no tone control - both pickups (gold MECs) are 'flat.' You then have only control over volume and panning from one pickup to the other.
When I pull the knob out I have to tweak the EQ sometimes a lot on the amp. When I push it in I have much more control over the tone (and much more growl!) The sound (when pulled out) isn't good enough IMHO to use it so I keep the knob pushed in all the time.
 
#27
I pulled all the controls out of my Douglas Pisces SCPB. I took off the pickguard, de-glossed the body, cut the headstock and put a SD Antiquities II SCPB wired directly to the plug. I also tinted the hardware to make it look old. I like it! Yes, it is a bit limiting but I don't care, it only has one job and that it to thunder...:p

SCPB2_zpsef27b511.jpg


Here it is next to my G&L SB-2, which actually has a tortoise shell pick guard, I just have a crappy camera...
SCPB-GnL_zpsa4998ea9.jpg
 
#31
for what its worth, I have some experience with this. my first bass, a (+/- '70 EB-3) was already stripped of its finish when I found it at 'We Buy Guitars" on 48th st in the mid 70s (believe it or not, tens of thousands of beautiful guitars and basses suffered the same fate in late 60s to early 70s - see Beatles / Epiphone Casino)

Anyway, my bass was already dog-ass ugly, and the weird multi position switch was broken; it just spun around in circles. So I took a bad thing and took it all the way. I pulled out the multi-position switch, and just kept going; tone controls, who needs em? Volume controls? why would anyone turn down? Tear em out. IN the end, I had an EB3 with the mud-bucker wired straight to one output jack and the mostly useless bridge pickup wired to another jack. the remaining holes (from tone and volume controls) were plugged with perfectly fitting little plastic plugs. The bass had no volume or tone pots, no selector switches; I had the choice of plugging into the mud-bucker or the no-bottom pickup. Tone and volume were just 'on'. I played that bass until i purchased a '70/71 Jazz bass around '81. I gotta say, I plugged into the mudbucker and never looked back; never missed volume or tone controls, and certainly never missed that EB-3 'vari-whazzit' selector switch.

I wish I had kept a copy of the serial number. The way things have gone recently, that bass is probably sitting in someone's collection as an authentic vintage Gibson bass that someone paid stupid money for.
 
#32
One of the reasons for the "mud bucker" moniker was that Gibson installed a "tone coil" in their basses. It was wired across the signal and in essence sucked all the treble frequencies to ground. If you disconnected the coil that pickup became alive. This was true for the EB0F and the EB2 that I owned.

The EB2 I would still own If I hadn't made the mistake of buying a '63 Precision from a friend. It came with no strings and No long scale strings were available in Liverpool at the time so it had to wait 'til I could take a trip to Manchester where they were available. once I played the Precision I never played the Gibson again and I sold it.

The Precision was my only bass for the next nineteen years.
 
#33
BassmanPaul said:
One of the reasons for the "mud bucker" moniker was that Gibson installed a "tone coil" in their basses. It was wired across the signal and in essence sucked all the treble frequencies to ground. If you disconnected the coil that pickup became alive. This was true for the EB0F and the EB2 that I owned.

The EB2 I would still own If I hadn't made the mistake of buying a '63 Precision from a friend. It came with no strings and No long scale strings were available in Liverpool at the time so it had to wait 'til I could take a trip to Manchester where they were available. once I played the Precision I never played the Gibson again and I sold it.

The Precision was my only bass for the next nineteen years.
Click to expand...

I did a similar thing to my Gibson back in the early 70's. I put a bypass switch in place that cut the "tone coil" out of the circuit. I should have just removed the coil - I never switched it on after the mod.
 
#34
Turnaround said:
I did a similar thing to my Gibson back in the early 70's. I put a bypass switch in place that cut the "tone coil" out of the circuit. I should have just removed the coil - I never switched it on after the mod.
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Removing it would have been difficult iME. I simply used it with some switching to give me more tone options. Wired in series it had some interesting effects.
 
#35
I almost forgot to mention - in my warped 19 year old brain, having two straight wire outputs also allowed me to play in 'stereo' - one cord into my Kustom/Voice of the Theatre rig and one cord to the silver face 4-10 bassman that was left in our student ghetto apt. by someone who never returned. I cranked the bassman into overdrive and it actually sounded kinda cool. But who is gonna drag all that equipment around? I think the whole 'stereo' rig made it to two jams and then I got by with one rig.
 
#36
FWIW, other way around, did not fit a tone stack on the amp, performed with that in the 70's. You become very good at controlling tone with finger/hands(s) and the passive tone control ( high cut ). The time you spend dicking about on an amp setting, is time not playing live. Even with modern active tone controls on the basses here, less is often better.... your call, have fun. Regards.
 
#38
gregmon79 said:
Wow middy, I can't say I've ever seen a bass without knobs. At all. It's not very common. But I do like it. It's very simple and to the point. It would be cool to have a bass laying around like this. But I'm so used to some type of onboard EQ, I think I'd really miss it. Or it would take me a hell'ava long time to adjust to the no knob style.
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I could probably do it. Or at least, I could do without a tone knob. I hardly ever use them.
 
#39
middy said:
I switch between fingers and pick in several of our songs. I have a bit of compression going to compensate. It doesn't take much... I don't like playing with a pick without compression anyway. I use the pick for bright or aggressive or loud passages/songs.
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Yeah, using the tone knob for switching between pick and fingers would never have occurred to me. I don't really use compression itself, though I do have some overdrive basically all the time, which serves as compression of a sort.
 
#40
I think that it's a good experiment for you to try. See for yourself what it does. A purist will tell you that anything in the signal path affects tone. A pickup's impedance varies with frequency. This is important to remember. Anything that you connect to it affects this impedance.

The instrument cable adds a significant capacitance in parallel to the instrument's circuit. This affects the impedance presented to the amp. The longer the cable the more the effect. So use a cable that is long enough for your needs, not longer.

With changes in impedance, the bass and mid frequencies are affected less than the higher frequencies. Removing the volume and bass controls from a bass has much less of an effect than that of a guitar where higher frequencies are important.

So it comes down to the pickup design, the tone control design, the instrument cable, and the amp design. Your milage will vary depending on the design of your gear. Use a short cable to minimize the affect on your signal going into your amp. This will go further than removing your volume and tone circuit.
 

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