I presently own a Stingray 4 w/ maple fret board (I believe it's about 2 - 3 years old). I love stingrays and their feel. However, I'm contemplating changing the on board preamp to get better, tighter, smoother, punchier lows while keeping decent highs and treble. My stock preamp seems to be very noisey and buzzy. When I touch the strings or bridge, it stops. However, I've read somewhere that it could be normal because of the stingray pickup. Anyway, has anyone out there changed the preamp? Any suggestions or advice? Would the stock pickup sound good with a new preamp or do I have to change both the pickup and preamp? Any advice, recommendations or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!! (if it makes a difference, my present rig is a SWR Bass 750 w/ Goliath III & Son of Bertha cabs)
I, and several others, have swapped out the stock pup and preamp to put in the Seymour Duncan Alnico MM pickup and SD MM preamp. Since both were swapped at the same time, I can't say for sure what result you would get only changing one of them. But the results I got were excellent - warmer lows, and the slap contour (pull the volume switch) on the SD MM preamp is great. The Alnico pickup is described as giving a warmer sound than the stock ceramic magnet pup. Personally, if you have the money I'd say swap them both out. I know this violates the 'change one thing at a time' rule, but I've yet to hear of anyone doing this and not loving the results.
I replaced the preamp first, and the pickup a few months later. Changing the preamp is IMO an improvement but I have to point that you have a ground problem with your stock preamp (or your amp), maybe one of the wires is loose inside the bass or maybe the amp is not properly grounded. My StingRay had no noise or buzz with the stock preamp unless the amp wasn't grounded. keep groooovin' Fran P.S. You can read a review of the SD system in http://www.bgra.net/reviews/seymourduncan-musicm-2-rvw.html
I bought a '95 Stingray and play it through the same setup (nice rig, BTW!!). i don't appear to have any buzz or ground problem, but new pre and pup would be something I would do if it means better tone. I love the 'Ray now but improving is always cool. Any idea about hou much this would cost? David, how much did you pay for what you described?
I think just under $200 for 3 band MM preamp and alnico pickup. I got mine from Black Rose Custom - best prices I saw, plus the guy there is very helpful. If something's not in stock, he'll get it for you fast. You'll see his price of, say $115, for the preamp. It'll then have shipping and handling of -$8, so it costs you $107. It's his way of getting round Seymour Duncan Minimum Advertised Prices.
Right, that's a good site, prices seem reasonable. Thanks! Sorry to bother, but is this just a simple change out? any issues?? Thanks again
Pretty straightforward. I didn't actually do this install, I got a tech to do it. That was one of the last things I paid for someone else to do, I generally do these things myself now. Looking at the wiring diagram, should be easy enough.
The soldering is quite simple. The trick is how to put the preamp into the body cavity. The space is really tight. I followed a guide that Bill Bolton wrote and that saved my life: Fitting the pre-amp to my '94 Stingray 4 knob fretless was not without it's moments (it is not as easy as Basslines or the Bass Player review suggest - see below) but once installed I'm very pleased with the sonic results. My Stringray is a lot less "brittle" sounding on the upper mids and highs while the lower mids sounded a lot "cleaner". To my ears there wasn't a great deal of difference in the bass end, which suits me fine, as the bass end was the aspect of the original Music Man electronics I was already happy with. The factory default on the "slap" switch isn't a great deal of use to me for my fretless styles, but I haven't yet had a chance to play around with the presets for it to see if a "useful to me" alternative fretless tone is achievable. There's 20db of gain on the boost side of the treble control, so fully cranking it does bring in a fair amount of hiss, but more modest amounts of treble boost were adequately quiet. One nice thing about the standard Music Man electronics is that nearly everything is on a Printed Circuit Board, so there is relatively little wire clutter in the control cavity. In comparison, by the time I'd finished with the Basslines electronics installation, there was and pretty much unavoidable mess of wire in the control cavity. The Basslines electronics consists of 4 pre-wired pots and a small circuit board with surface mount electronic components on it. The wiring between the pots and the circuit board goes through two colour coded multi-pin connectors but there are still half a dozen or so solder connections that need to be made between the overall Basslines electronics package and the fixed wiring in the Stingray. I started the installation by unscrewing the control plate and snipping the existing 5 wires attach to the Music Man circuit board, leaving just enough attached to the circuit board so I could tell which colours went where, if I ever decide to reinstall it. I then unbolted the pots from the chrome cover plate and put the old electronics assembly aside. Next, the new pots were mounted on the control cover plate. Basslines provides a lock washer, flat washer and nut on each pot, but if the pot is mounted using only those components, the knobs stick up a long way off the cover plate.... much higher than on the Music Man electronics. I ended up using the nuts from the original pots on the new pots, below the lock washers, so I could control how much of the pot thread poked through above the control plate. The original nuts were a slightly larger size and were a loose fit on the Basslines pot threads but were still able to grip adequately to work. Basslines provides set of black knobs to fit to the pots, but I elected to reuse the original chrome knobs and they fitted onto the new pots shafts OK. The Basslines knobs are noticeably lighter than the Music Man knobs, enough that over 4 knobs it does make a difference, so if Stingray weight is an issue for you, then the Basslines knobs could be useful. Having finished mounting everything on the control plate, I turned my attention to the new electronics. The circuit board has a velcro pad on the back and Basslines provide a matching strip of self adhesive velcro to stick inside the control cavity to hold the circuit board in place. The circuit board is just the right size to fit on the bottom of part of the control rout, but I found when I tried to mount in there, it was not possible to plug the connectors into the board. After a bit of head scratching, I hit on the idea of mounting the circuit board on the side of the cavity and this turned out to be the only practical place. The connectors now fit, but the preset pots are not adjustable while the circuit board is mounted. It has to be unvelcroed to adjust the preset pots. I'll have more to say about the Basslines instructions shortly, but the complete absence of specific instructions on where to mount the electronics in Music Man basses is a serious shortcoming, given the narrow focus of this product onto one brand of bass. Finally having everything mounted, I soldered the remaining connections and insulated them with heatshrink tubing. This left me with a control plate with mounted pots, a circuit board on the edge of the control cavity and a mini-tangle of wires. Even a quick lacing job on the wires only tidied things up a little. When I went to remount the control cover, it would not sit snugly down against the body at the neck end. Investigation showed that the switch pot used for the volume control is very nearly as deep as the control route and the extra couple of millimeters I had set the pot back from the cover (to make sure the knob didn't sit too high above the cover) meant that the bottom of the switch assembly did not have any clearance above the bottom of the control cavity. Rerouting the wires from the pickup to go around rather than under the switch fixed that and I was able to mount the control cover snugly against the body. All up this probably took about an hour and 15 minutes to complete, rather longer than the 30 minutes suggested in the Bass Player review. The instructions supplied by Basslines are, frankly, rather rudimentary and do not cover the installation an adjustment of the electronics package in anywhere near enough detail. I've done a lot of this sort of work on guitars and basses over the years and still found myself wondering what to do next on several occasions during the installation. While I was able to solve the various problems I encountered along the way, a few extra sentences and a diagrams in the instructions could have saved me a lot of time and some frustration. keep groooovin' Fran
