Replacing tone pot with a rotary tone selctor switch.

[Will_White]

Don't know if you're familiar with a gent by the name of Joe Gore. But he's a superb guitarist (played with Tom Waits and a host of others) and does the occasional column on modding for Premier Guitar magazine.

Anyway, he has a website (tonefiend.com) that gets into a lot of mods and sonic experiments that it may be worth to looking into. It's guitar oriented. But much that's there carries over to bass. And many of the comments are from fellow experimenters and tinkerers, so this is one site where the comments can actually be worth reading.

He did a series of articles (with videos) on some of the varitone type circuits you can play with. Search link to just the varitone articles Invalid Link Removed.

Cool site. If you're into passive mods, Joe is your guy. His "no talk with deadpan expression" videos where he demos things are a riot.

I'll second checking out Joe's site, it's where I get a lot of the ideas for my funky wiring schemes from and his demos are great none of the incessant talking you usually get with gear demos.

 

[Laurent]

I tried a Tonestyler (11 positions) without a tone control and did not particularly like it.
It does what it's supposed to do and works well but my P bass no longer sounded like one, the mids were weird to my ears.
I can't fault the product, the product is really high quality and works super well, it's just a matter of personal taste.

It's interesting to experiment with Tonestylers however (and they're not expensive). In terms of tone nobody should tell you what's right or wrong, only your ears.

Personally, I like traditional old school tones so there is no need to reinvent the tone control on a bass.

 

[Thumper]

I really like the 4 way rotary switch used by Dingwall, for more info go to the Dingwall owners club thread. You can solo PUPs, combine them, have them wired in series/parallel. IMO far more useful then a blend pot. Sheldon referred me to a U.S. source, if you want I can dig up the email.