Just been bought a Yamaha TRBX174EW bass as a gift. I'm a complete noob to basses (and a beginner on guitars generally) so please forgive any stupid questions.
Seems like very good value for the money, but maybe some room for improvement. I've already fitted flatwounds, set up the truss rod, intonation (pretty much spot on until everything beds in- including me and action height for zero fret buzz. I already knew how to do all of this from my 6-strings (2015 Gibson USA SG Standard cherry red, 2020 MIM Telecaster Flame Top blue and a 2019 d'Angelico Bowery acoustic my wife bought me last August starting all of this - if only she had known ha-ha).
Questions therefore:
Q1 - Tuning engines - any point in upgrading and if so recommendations for ones that fit with zero / minimum number of new screw holes?
Q2 - Knobs - any ideas for bigger / shinier / nicer ones and would the pots need to be changed to fit them?
Q2 - Any suggestions, longer term, for pickup changes?
Simple, modest, options please. This is a $230 bass not a $2300 bass, after all
Thanks.
Welcome! The TRBX 174 is indeed a beginner instrument; Yamaha makes quality where it counts at every level, but you can do better.
I second the Hipshot suggestion; they make tuners in pretty much every style to fit every instrument, right here in the USA, and they are highly-regarded for quality and durability. Schaller and Sperzel are European makes also well-liked and commonly used on custom instruments. Gotoh is an Asian brand, and many Asian-made instruments come stock with rebadged or de-badged Gotohs already equipped. They are a good-quality machine but most will say the other brands I've already mentioned are better.
Instrument control pots are almost always 6mm shaft diameter, and come in one of three basic styles; solid-shaft, and fine- or coarse-splined split-shaft. Generally speaking, knobs are made specifically to fit one of these pot shaft styles, and you should replace like-for-like. I believe the TRBX174 uses split-shaft, as I recognize those cheap plastic knobs from the RBX260 that was my own first bass. If you're looking for a larger knob to fit the body size a bit better, I recommend you look for "speed knobs", traditionally used on Gibson-style guitars:
Similar knobs to these have been used on other entry-level Yamaha instruments such as the BB series, so they won't look out of place on your TRBX.
Pickups, I personally have to caution you about. Yes, you probably aren't happy with the sound you're getting, and yes, new pickups will change that sound. However, this is an all-too-common pitfall of the beginning player; the search for that magical elixir, that one missing piece, that will cure their ills on the instrument. The reality is that Victor Wooten is going to sound more like himself playing your current rig as-is, than you're going to sound like him playing his rig. That's because your sound as a bassist is determined by "the complete instrument", which starts with your mentality and technique as a player, and proceeds through every component of your bass and amplifier and into the room you're playing in. You can very easily get sucked into the marketing hype that "all you need is to buy our product and your sound will improve". It's extremely seductive, and extremely expensive, and even if you can afford to tumble down this rabbit hole, all that time spent upgrading your instrument with this or that new part, is not being spent
playing it.
There's a second concern, which is that playing your bass either solo in your bedroom or accompanied by mastered music tracks gives you a misleading sense of "good tone". It's a very natural pitfall, because we all start out in our bedrooms playing quietly, so nobody hears how much we suck. That makes us subject to the "human equal loudness curve" aka the "Fletcher-Munson Curve". To oversimplify, humans are most perceptive to frequencies between about 2 and 4 kHz, and need significantly more treble and bass for the mix to sound evenly balanced across the spectrum. Further, this curve steepens as overall volume decreases, so the quieter the mix, the more treble and bass you want in it. And lastly, specific frequencies of importance to the bass guitar as an instrument are common examples of "unpleasant" tonal qualities, such as "nasal" (~600Hz), "brassy" (~1.2kHz), etc, so even as these frequencies are in a less perceptible range compared to the upper mids, savvy listeners commonly want less of them, which typically leads to cuts in the low mids of the EQ.
That may all sound great when you play with a recorded track in your headphones, and you may want to further nudge the tone in that direction with a pickup swap for a set of coils that sound brighter and bassier in a solo demo recording. However, when you turn it up for rehearsals with other instruments, you'll quickly find that you disappear completely in the audible mix of instruments, even with the amp cranked and the walls shaking. You'll also sound undefined and out of tune even if you're perfectly in-tune, because the only frequencies you're letting out of your speaker are so low that the frequency difference between notes are very small, making it hard to tell the difference between one note and another. To be heard in a live mix, you need mids, which means you need a rig capable of producing them, which you won't have if you've been spending your money crafting a perfect highly-scooped bedroom tone.
In summary, before you drop hard-earned money on a new set of pickups for this bass, I highly recommend you become accustomed, as much as possible, to the way bass guitar actually sounds in a live mix at performance volumes, and compare your rig - at these same volumes - to that standard. Studio recordings feature extremely processed bass (and in fact extremely processed
everything), designed to sound good to the average listener through consumer audio equipment. That studio track has little to no bearing on how that same group sounds live playing that same song, and it hasn't for maybe 40 years now, since the hi-fi consumer audio revolution of the late '70s led to an overhaul in how popular music was recorded and produced.
