Wazkelly Build diary for DIY closing down sale Ash J Bass

[wazkelly]

Good point. Bridge already on it's way which is all good as I should have done that originally rather then persist with the cheapie stock unit.

Will attack Pup heights first to see if that is the culprit and then move on to installing the better bridge which has greater mass and should also mean better sustain.

[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.

[Simon Barden]

The Entwistle JBX dimension drawings http://www.entwistlepickups.com/asse...%20drawing.pdf seem to indicate that the pole pieces run right through the pickup and out through the bottom. I can't find any pictures of the underside of the pickups on the web, so you'll have to tell us what the solution to the mystery is once you have them off to deepen the pockets.

[wazkelly]

Cheers Simon, will do.

[DrNomis_44]

It may be that the pickup is too high and the magnetic pull is affecting the tuning (fretting on the 12th fret will bring the string nearer the pickup, so any magnetic pull will have more effect on the string than when open). This is quite common on Strats. You may find that by lowering the pickup height, you solve the intonation issue.

That's something I have had first-hand experience with on my Gold Strat, I couldn't work out why I couldn't accurately set the intonation of the low E-String, then it turned out that the magnetic pole-pieces of the pickups ( three Entwistle ASN57 noiseless pickups) were the cause due to the pickup routing not being deep enough to accommodate them, the result was that the pole-piece for the low-E-String was too close to the E-String, if the tone of the string sounds a bit warbly, that's a dead give-away that the pole-piece is too close to the string, the magnetic pull tends to make the string vibrate at a lower frequency than it should.

[Fretworn]

I bought the Lakland from Neil Murray (Whitesnake, Gary Moore etc.).

So was this a random eBay/classifieds type thing, or do you know Neil? Did you talk to him or were you star-struck/too cool. I'm a huge pre-blues phase Gary Moore fan.

[Simon Barden]

A random eBay check. I have a general search set up for all things musical with one hour left to go, which I often run at the less popular times of the day. And I think I picked it up on one of those. Very little interest in the bass and I picked it up, including a case and big leather strap, for £440 (A$730) , when the list price was around £1000 (A$1660) for the bass alone. I've had some amazing bargains that way, especially on some items with badly spelled descriptions, or even incorrect descriptions. It had had a Hipshot X-tender fitted and the original pickups replaced with Bartolinis. It's a really nice bass (so it's being wasted on me). It also has had a second round string tree fitted to hold down the A string.

I picked it up from his house, so got to meet him. I did take along my friend Max, who does know him slightly and played alongside him on stage at a guitar show. He was a very nice chap, we stayed and chatted for about 10 minutes. But it wasn't until afterwards that I found out that another mate's band's drummer also played in Neil Murray's fun gigging band (they were both in the "We Will Rock You" house band). Had I known that, that would have been something else to talk about. But you got the feeling that he was about ready to retire from regular professional bass playing, so was selling off all unnecessary equipment.

[DrNomis_44]

@ Wazkelly One other thing you can try checking on your Ash J Bass is the neck relief, Fender specify a clearance gap of .012 of an inch between the top of the 8th fret and the bottom of the strings, you can use a standard set of Automotive feeler-gauges and a capo to check the neck-relief on your Bass guitar, the first thing that you do is place the capo on the neck just behind the first fret in front of the nut so that all the strings are resting on the first fret, next, select a .012 inch feeler-gauge, then fret the low E-String at the 17th fret, using the .012 inch feeler gauge, check the clearance at the 8th fret while you're fretting the string at the 17th fret, the .012 inch gauge should just fit between the 8th fret and the bottom of the string, tighten or loosen the truss rod till the .012 gauge does fit, then do the same for the G-String, I've found that the neck relief, and truss-rod tension also has an effect on the intonation adjustments too.

Hope that is of some help mate.

[wazkelly]

Thanks Doc. Got a work conference on this weekend in Brisbane so it may not be until Sunday night before I have any spare time to look at it.

[DrNomis_44]

Thanks Doc. Got a work conference on this weekend in Brisbane so it may not be until Sunday night before I have any spare time to look at it.

No worries mate, hope the work conference goes well.