Where's the beef? Pickups, preamp... or nothing?

I think I would replace pickups and preamp first. With as many bassists on this site that are constantly modding their bass, there is usually great stuff for sale in the classifieds here on TB.

 

Get some passive pickups, tear out that Phat II bass boost & install a bass cut knob, like what G&L puts in the L-2000 & ASAT basses.
There basically isn't a full-on preamp in the GIOs, just that crappy bass boost needs a battery.

TBH I wish my Ibanez Premium was passive.
A good preamp is transparent when the knobs are set for zero gain or boost & that's how my Ibanez is.

However, I have owned some where the preamp did a lot of the heavy lifting, like in a MIK BTB300 I had.

If the bass cut knob doesn't appeal to you, install a 3-way toggle in the forward-most hole.

 

Most likely the bass has passive pickups, it just has that miserable (IMO) Ibanez "Phat II" preamp in it. Those can be easily bypassed and you won't need to change the volume controls or tone controls.

 

My starting point would be to do the best setup I could with good strings, play it for a while, get to know what it does and then decide if it needs anything. But then, that’s just me, YMMV.

Otto

 

Unfortunately, soap bar pickups ain’t cheap. You could look out for some used EMG HZs (maybe someone upgraded and they’re selling their HZs). IMO, anything lower in quality isn’t worth buying, and is probably equivalent to what you already have.

 

Given your concern over the pickups and electronics, I was also speaking to a careful optimization of pickup height, which is also part of instrument setup. In particular, checking the effect of pickup to string spacing at manufacturer’s spec and also trying both closer and farther than spec to see what might best suit the sound you are after.

Otto

 

I saw a SR306E in a pawn shop today. Those are the pickups to go for IMHO, but I'm not sure how you'd check if they'd fit:



Maybe you could talk your local Ibanez dealer into quoting you a price for some PowerSpan pickups.

 

The preamp is always in the signal path, it’s just a one band active preamp. I get the impression that a number of folk have replaced theirs. You might want to try subbing in a two band preamp that is more to your liking.

Otto

 

Also, you might be interested in this thread.

Lose the Phat

One post includes a circuit diagram. The bass is wired up like a passive with two 500K volumes and a passive HF tone, but then sends the signal thru the Phat module right before the output jack.

Turned all the way down it should be flat, but you could take it out of the circuit and it would be wired like a Jazz Bass. It’s said to be a slap contour, meaning it boosts bass and treble and cuts mids.

Otto

 

You can convert two of the knobs into once concentric pot:

 

You could also just leave one of the controls inside the bass & non-adjustable.

It would get tricky to remove the pot, because you'd need to substitute a resistor in it's place to keep that control at zero boost/cut.
Or alternatively you could not & then it would be 100% boosted or 100% cut

 

This might be worth trying. I think I might start by taking the Phat module out and just running it as a passive bass, then perhaps trying the other preamp once I had a sense of which of the controls would be most useful.

Actually, if it were me, I’d ditch the Phat module and replace with a Q filter mid-cut control and keep it as a passive bass. You can see how I installed a Q filter in my P bass in this thread:

If P, then Q!

If you do decide to explore that option, you will not need a stacked pot the way I did on the P bass, since you would have the spare hole from the Phat to use a normal pot on the Q filter.

Otto