Wazkelly Build diary for DIY closing down sale Ash J Bass

[DrNomis_44]

Are your pickups set as high as they can be without affecting the strings?

Actually, no, the pickups are both set so that the tops of them are about 4mm above the surface of the Scratchplate, I'm pretty sure that Fender quote a spec for P-Bass pickup heights, my feeling is that my Squire P-Bass could do with a bit hotter set of pickups, maybe the magnetic pole-pieces of the current ones are a bit weak, the reason why I reckon the pickups are a bit wimpy is that when I plug the Bass straight into input 1 of my Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 Audio Interface, I have to crank the channel gain a bit, that's with the Bass going straight in with no other pedals or buffers, etc, connected, maybe it just needs a preamp, my understanding is that the Stewmac Golden Age P-Bass pickups are wound to vintage specs, as far as I know, there are no issues with the wiring (I actually did the wiring myself, using a wiring-diagram from my Guitar Player Repair Handbook), it's a simple enough pickup-wiring system that I'm confident I didn't make any errors, and the bridge is earthed to circuit-ground (I checked it with a multimeter set to low-ohms and I'm getting a reading of about .1 Ohm, so it's definitely grounded, well the strings are anyway).

[Simon Barden]

Actually, no, the pickups are both set so that the tops of them are about 4mm above the surface of the Scratchplate,

Well, I'd try raising them so that they are closer to the strings before you think about swapping them over. Just about all of the Focusrite interfaces have a poorly designed instrument input with very little headroom (most people with humbuckers can't record directly using them without digital clipping), so if your pickups aren't hot enough on their own without some gain, then it sounds like there's room for improvement. I've fitted some BareKnuckle vintage spec P-bass pups to a friend's JV Squire P-bass, and they weren't lacking punch. It's either that or you simply aren't playing the strings hard enough! I'm a guitar player so I do tend to play bass very lightly but a lot of the bass players I know really pull at the strings.

If you've got a really big bass rig, then you can play lightly and let the amp do the work. But most bass players started off with small rigs and had to work hard to be heard above the guitarist and drummer.

You may need to add some more foam to the back of the pickups to get enough height. If so, look out for sheets of adhesive backed neoprene foam rubber on eBay. You can get a whole sheet for the price of a pre-cut piece designed for pickups. i bought a whole range of different height sheets and haven't regretted it. It comes in very useful.

[DrNomis_44]

Well, I'd try raising them so that they are closer to the strings before you think about swapping them over. Just about all of the Focusrite interfaces have a poorly designed instrument input with very little headroom (most people with humbuckers can't record directly using them without digital clipping), so if your pickups aren't hot enough on their own without some gain, then it sounds like there's room for improvement. I've fitted some BareKnuckle vintage spec P-bass pups to a friend's JV Squire P-bass, and they weren't lacking punch. It's either that or you simply aren't playing the strings hard enough! I'm a guitar player so I do tend to play bass very lightly but a lot of the bass players I know really pull at the strings.

If you've got a really big bass rig, then you can play lightly and let the amp do the work. But most bass players started off with small rigs and had to work hard to be heard above the guitarist and drummer.

You may need to add some more foam to the back of the pickups to get enough height. If so, look out for sheets of adhesive backed neoprene foam rubber on eBay. You can get a whole sheet for the price of a pre-cut piece designed for pickups. i bought a whole range of different height sheets and haven't regretted it. It comes in very useful.

Cheers, I'll give that a go before I change out the pickups, I do tend to have a fairly light picking-technique, about the only Bass amp I have is an old 30 Watt Peavey TKO 80 (the one without the EQ on it), I'm currently in the process of doing some work on it, and I'm looking at getting a proper Bass amp speaker for it soon, it currently has a 10 Inch Response HiFi Bass speaker installed in the cabinet, which I bought from my local Jaycar Electronics store, it was all I could afford at the time and I needed to replace the original speaker in order to use the amp at a gig a couple of days later, I am working on the TKO 80 because it seems to have some residual distortion whenever I play a note through it, I worked out that it's either the current speaker, or the amp is self-oscillating at a very high frequency, I have already changed-out the main supply filter caps on the amps PCB, and the grounding seems to be all good, maybe I need to replace all the other electrolytic caps, seeing as the amp is easily over 15 years old anyway.