Well I'm not 100% finished yet, but my old Brooklyn NS-2 is looking a little more back to normal after this weekend.
Then I was ready for mounting the pickups. I lucked out and scored some old Dimarzio P/J's. These even had the PAF stickers on the bottom, so I knew they were from the same era that the bass was made.
So then I mounted them to the body, and had the bridge ground wire run, and reinstalled the bridge (after a light cleaning of course)
Then it was time to start wiring. I was able to find a MM114 HAZ copy preamp on ebay, so I dropped that in. I also wired up one of the switches to its original function which was a phase switch for the P pickup. It actually sounds pretty cool. The other switch would have been a passive switch, but I couldn't figure out how to wire it correctly given the layout of the MM114.
Now it sounds good but I will need to replace the balance pot on the preamp to work correctly with passive pickups. It sounds great when you solo either pickup, but when they're blended the tone gets really thin and dull. I suspect its because the value (25K) is for active pickups. I'll have to source out a new pot.
I also have a TP on the back burner with a very cool idea of how to wire it up one day, should I not be able to get the MM114's blend knob to work correctly with these passive pickups.
But thats all for now!
I have the same preamp and pickups (PAF and all) in my NS-2A, before you switch out the pots, have you tried swapping the phase of one of the pickups to see if that's the problem with bland tone?
When I wired my Dimarzios in, I had to switch the green and red wires around on one of the pickups to get them to sound right when blended together, so while green goes to ground and red goes to hot from one pickup to the board (I had black and white soldered together so pickup is in series) the other I had to have green to hot and red to ground on the board.
Just something to try that is a lot quicker and easier than switching a pot before you go to all that trouble!
