Hi Guys, just a quick upgrade I have done to my MMB-4 fretless. I’m only posting this in case it can help someone else if they are heading down the same track.
I was never satisfied with the tone of the original pickup. I think the standard kit probably has a ceramic pickup and it sounded tad thin for my “old school” mellow approach and I wanted something closer to my Fender Jazz. I can’t afford expensive boutique type pickups so I went with 2 Guitar Fetish pickups with Alnico 5 magnets.
To say I was disappointed with the outcome would be an understatement. This is not a criticism of the GF pickups but because I used the kit’s standard 250k pots. The 250k pots combined with the new Alnico pups made the bass quite dark and muddy. So I have replaced the standard pots with 500k ones and it now sounds closer to what I was looking for.
But I think that as the pickups are identical and as I extended the fingerboard to nearly 2 octaves I am not getting enough distance between the two pickups to make much of a tonal difference between them. So I might order a 1meg pot for the bridge pickup. That should brighten it up quite substantially and give me a greater tone choice between the two pickups.
I made a quick wiring loom that includes 3 ring terminals, so that if I do swap pots I will not have to solder an earth to the body of each pot and that should make changing and experimenting with pots a lot less painful. I have never been happy with my soldering ability and am always concerned about applying too much heat to the body of the pot.
This is the quick and dirty loom
And this is it all soldered up showing 2 of the 3 pots. So now to replace a pot all I have to do is solder the terminals of each pot and chuck it in the guitar. The ring terminals will earth each pot to the control plate. (The more astute among you may notice that I had wired the tone pot incorrectly. D’oh, I told you I have never been happy with my soldering abilities. Lol)
Conclusion:
I’m really happy with the update and the bass now has a lot more bottom end presence and a little more definition. Maybe I should have just tried an active pre-amp to the existing pickup, but for whatever reason I decided to go for twin Alnicos. I guess that as I have played my old Fender Jazz for 30 years I have grown accustomed to 2 pickups.
I should mention that I have changed the pot wiring from the standard kit’s V/B/T to a Jazz bass’ V/V/T. I have no idea if that makes a difference, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.
Cheers guys
rob