Waz's MMB-4

[Adam Barnes]

Looks good

[Simon Barden]

No pickguard, just the wood. http://www.buildyourownguitar.com.au...l=1#post146244

[wazkelly]

Thats going to look so nice Waz. Is it getting a pick guard or keeping all that lovely wood showing?

Hi Deddy, the kit comes with a white one which doesn't look too bad and I cut out some black card board and shaped one up to see the difference as I was tending to lean more towards a black one when the Minister for War & Finance declared that she liked this build the most of all 6 and definitely without a pick guard. She did say that if I was to do a pick guard her preference was white???

All nudey natural from here on seeing that I now have royal assent.

The funny thing is on each of the previous builds she has declared that one her latest favourite until the next one had been started. This all goes back to the Red J Bass. Mind you, she is not a fan of orange but convinced me to stick with it on the EX-5 build #1 as I was not so sure and about to sand it all off and start again.

She is starting to ask me how many more do I need and where are we going to put them so this one may be it for a while. Besides, I am spending so much time tinkering on builds that I never get to play any of them too often.

[wazkelly]

Thanks Marcel & Adam. Just wet sanded with 1200 half an hour ago getting it ready from some more coats tomorrow night.

[RalphH]

Belcat pre amp arrived at work today earlier than expected and have been pondering how you wire it up as there were no instructions or wiring diagram included. This is all I could find on the web......
Attachment 18473Attachment 18474Attachment 18475

The red circled bit shows the double stacked blend pot where you wire the hot from each PUP to the centre lug and earth to the same earthed lug on each row. Sounds simple enough and just need to work out which wires do what from the kit supplied PUP.

Hi Waz

This is how I'm going to wire my MMB-5 using the same EQ-B2T preamp as you have with the stock kit supplied PUP.
The pull switch puts the coils in series for a meaty rock tone, otherwise it has the same functionality as the Jazz bass parallel (with individual vol) configuration.
This may be an attractive option for you depending on the styles of music you are going to use your bass for. The 250K Bourns switched pot is under $15, so it's a low cost upgrade.

[wokkaboy]

nice wiring setup Ralph. Should get plenty of different sounds out of 1 humbucker !
Better check the resistance of the volume pots, are they 250k (for the switch pot) ?

[RalphH]

nice wiring setup Ralph. Should get plenty of different sounds out of 1 humbucker !
Better check the resistance of the volume pots, are they 250k (for the switch pot) ?

As standard, the MMB-4/5 kit has 500K volume pots, however for single coil PUPs, (which essentially this pickup has two of when wired independantly) 250K is common. You could use 500K pots for a slightly brighter sound, but this is a bass and does not have much in the audio spectrum above 7Khz anyway.

[wokkaboy]

ok thanks Ralph, I was getting confused. I put the same preamp in my JBA-4 but think maybe the blend pot was 20k. Makes sense using 250k for the volume.

[wazkelly]

Hmmm, food for thought as I have push/pull switches on a couple of other builds too.

I thought these came pre-set as a humbucker already therefore wired in series. The cable reveals 4 wire and bare earth and is identical to HB's that I had in my EX-5 before being replaced with Custom Bensons where push/pulls were used to coil split which essentially created JB single coil sounds. From memory I still kept the pots at 500k and same orange drop capacitor and it has plenty of beefy mid to bottom end sounds in either HB or coil tapped modes.

Curious to try out the blend pot as that will act more like a switch between the front and rear coils and it should also drop them back to single coil mode when biased either side of the mid detent point. If that doesn't work out so good will have another look at your wiring diagram and try and figure out why there are 1k resistors on each vol pot? Treble bleed perhaps?

[Simon Barden]

No, they come wired for parallel operation. That's already a pretty thick sound, wiring them in series might make it a bit too thuddy and bassy. Standard wiring for them just keeps the two coils in parallel, with a volume for each coil, so you can go front or back single coil if you want. The output in parallel mode is quite hot. so series will be even hotter.

Keep that in mind with Ralph's schematic as there is small possibility that the pre-amp might not have sufficient headroom and you get a touch of distortion in the series mode at full volume. Just depends on the preamp design.