Squier Bronco Bass fretless conversion

[soupofthedave]

I had a Squier Bronco bass laying around my apartment that I had no use for, so I decided to convert the neck to fretless.

I had a few images of the progress and final product on my phone, so here they are (sorry about the quality)

more pictures to come

 

[soupofthedave]

 

[soupofthedave]

The finished product!!

 

[rllefebv]

Nice! I did mine a few years ago, and then it was loose in my Jeep when I got rear ended... Been out of commission since then, but hopefully back in the game soon...

-robert

 

[iiipopes]

Nice work. A rails pickup, like a Seymour Duncan Cool Rails, or a little hotter wind if you want more mids, would complete the bass.

 

[Pilgrim]

If you used some kind of filler on the slot holes, I hope they remain stable for you. A solid material such as veneer or polystrene strips should be used to fill the open slots so the board won't tend to bend forward. This is well documented in many discussions.

The visual result is pretty clean. I'd like to see a cleaner closeup of the fret slots, as there appeared to be substantial chipping of the maple next to the fret slots. That's always a problem. On my defret job I spent a couple of hours gluing tiny chips back into all the chipped areas.

But - if this is a learning experience for you, the result looks decent and there's little money at risk. That's not a bad way to learn new skills...and to find out what else you need to learn.

 

[madmachinist]

duncan hotrails ! the $30 (used price ) tele neck pickup version i put in mine sounds huge , esp. compared to the stock, thin-sounding 6-pole guitar pickup .

why they sell this bass with a nasty 6-string guitar pickup , and not a 4 pole bass pickup is beyond belief . it really is a cool little instrument when
set up properly - the pickup cutout needs squaring-off with a hacksaw blade and file to fit the mini-humbucker .

 

[Joel T]

My Squier Bronco Bass is now fretless. I had the fretless conversion project finished this week. I took this bass to a local Sam Ash music store as their guitar tech did a beautiful fretless conversion on the neck part. I played around with this bass, and it sounded beautiful! Here it is.

 

[Turnaround]

I had a Squier Bronco bass laying around my apartment that I had no use for, so I decided to convert the neck to fretless.

Please tell me you didn't use wood filler to fill in the fret slots.

 

[Joel T]

Please tell me you didn't use wood filler to fill in the fret slots.

Negative if you ask me, as the guitar tech used white binding veneers instead. The wood filler wouldn't look very nice.

 

[Seanmo]

duncan hotrails ! the $30 (used price ) tele neck pickup version i put in mine sounds huge , esp. compared to the stock, thin-sounding 6-pole guitar pickup .

why they sell this bass with a nasty 6-string guitar pickup , and not a 4 pole bass pickup is beyond belief . it really is a cool little instrument when
set up properly - the pickup cutout needs squaring-off with a hacksaw blade and file to fit the mini-humbucker .

Leo Fender -- you may have heard of him -- designed the Bronco Bass to use a Strat 6 pole pickup. Fender is NOT being cheap. They are actually following the original design. Which by the way works. And should, if you actually know how magnetic pickups work. I made the mistake of ordering a rails pickup BEFORE my Bronco arrived based on what other people were saying here. Now that the Bronco is here, the rails just sits unused and neglected in its box. My 30" SS Jag with PJ pickups sounds different than my 30" Bronco bass with the single coils. I like how it sounds, it is not noisy in my environment, and I like that it doesn't sound like the Jag. Sometimes the best mod is not to mod at all, but to simply setup your instrument properly and use it the way it was designed.

That said, I wish I had the skillz to defret mine (or a 2nd Bronco) because I am having a hard time playing my 34" scale fretless JB (due to permanent injury), and an even harder time finding an affordable short scale fretless. Now that Ibanez has stopped making their Mikro fretless, Fender really should introduce a lined, fretless version of their Precision Mini Bass in 3TSB. That would turn heads!

 

[andare]

AFAIK the Music master Bass, which the Bronco is based on, was a parts bass out together by Fender. It's a cheaper Mustang equipped with Mustang guitar pickups.

I don't know if the 6 pole pieces are bad with 4 strings. Nick Campbell gets great tones out of his Music master equipped with (what looks like) a guitar Guyatone pickup in the neck and a Jazzmaster pickup in the bridge, both with 6 poles.

The pickup in the Bronco is just super cheap. It doesn't sound bad IMO but the signal to single coil hum ratio is the lowest I've ever heard. Same thing when I split coil the Artec dual blade HB I replaced it with. The hum is so loud it's unusable. YMMV

 

[Joel T]

 

[Joel T]

I just made a bass cover video with my fretless Bronco Bass. Here it is:

 

[Joel T]

I made another short video of my fretless Bronco Bass, featuring my unique, de-fretted, 5-string Sterling by Music Man StingRay.
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[Joel T]

Here's another one if you like some rock and metal music.