A quick pause, to memorialize the "donor" bass. 19 years ago, I bought an SX bass--a Chinese-made bass from a Taiwanese company that sold exclusively through a mail order distributor. It was incredibly cheap, but well finished, played reasonably well, stayed in tune.... This is how it looked when it was new:
I bought it to experiment with mods. It was not un-Jazz bass sounding, but I wanted something a bit closer to a p-bass sound, so I replaced the pickups with DiMarzio J's (DP123). These are split coil humbuckers--like a P-bass pickup, but side by side, so that they look like j-bass pickup. I also thought I experiment with the electronics. I put in a master volume and master tone pot, and put a blend pot between them. I put in push pull pots to switch from serial to parallel. I never used the parallel mode, and ultimately did not really like the blend pot. I played it at a Halloween party because I thought it might rain, and sometimes kept it in my office at work. As I stared to build my first PitBull guitar, I tried all of the setup stuff first on the SX, before trying in on the build (an ESB-4). In the process I got it to the point where it was really playing well...
...which got me thinking about upgrades. The DiMarzios sounded like something in between a P and J pickup...which turned out not to be what I liked. What I really wanted was a real P-bass sound, with the ability to dial in a bit of J-bass growl. So I got a set of EMG Geezer Butler pickups--passive, alnico V, with increased output from the J-pickup to balance the generally louder output from the P-pickup. They sounded great! Now it played well and sounded great... but it had some neck dive. So it got Gotoh Res-o-lite tuners. I also swapped out the pickguard and control plate...so now it looked like this:
Now it played well, stayed in position sounded good, and I continued to replace parts...but about 30 min to an hour playing it and my back stared to twinge, and sometimes my left fingers started to tingle. I really liked the bass, but it needed to lose some weight. So, I got a paulownia body and then I found a cheap neck on line...and the modded bass became a donor bass. When I took off all parts that I had at some point replaced, it left me with just the string tree, the bridge, the neck plate and its bolts.
It's going back in it's gig-bag for now, although I have a plan, perhaps, to resurrect it... For now, though, I did not want to just put all the parts on a new body and neck without a reflecting on the bass they came from. I learned a lot from this bass. The wear on the frets is an indicator that it got played. It was ultimately a terrific bass that exceeded all reasonable expectations.
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