Jazz bass Mod becomes Build?

[Trevor Davies]

That was quick!

FWIW, I had purchased a set of non-angled shims. Very annoying.

[fender3x]

That was quick!

FWIW, I had purchased a set of non-angled shims. Very annoying.

Amazon is good for some things ;-)

I had seen enough complaints about shims that were not tapered that I figured it might be worth posting the brand name of some cheap ones that were. $10 would be too much for non-angled shims, but fine for what I got. Stewies are over $35 which seems like way too much even if they are perfect...and actually nailing an exact angle of 1 degree or less in a shim would be asking kind of a lot.

[fender3x]

I have been doing a little more thinking about this, and I think the most important thing, is that you get shims with three different tapers, if you're going to purchase them. The taper itself may not matter so much as long as they're different from each other. Even though the angles on the ones that I got are a little smaller than advertised, they still give a lot of options. It gives me seven different increments, depending on how they are stacked, between 0.18-1.28.

I ended up stacking 2 shims, and could have gone up by 2 more increments If I had need to, or down 4 if I had need to go that way.

I think I probably could have made shims from veneer that would have done roughly the same thing, but it would most likely have taken me a couple of tries to get it shimmed to the right angle. I tried calculating the angle I needed, but I was off by a little.

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[Trevor Davies]

OK. It must be time to make a shim making jig! Thinking caps on.

[fender3x]

Ok, you have me thinking. I like that the commercial ones are made of maple, but making them would be tricky. I once made two maple pickup rings...I can't remember how many I broke along the way...and they were considerably thicker than shims....

Although not a jig, a thought would be to make a stepped wedge out of veneer, glue a piece of veneer on the stepped side, then glue veneer to the stepped side and sand it flat.

If there were a way to do it quickly, it might make sense to make a whole bunch that are 0.25°. That way you could just stack them to get the angle you wanted.

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I am getting to like the neck on this bass, but when I get the action where I like it there is some buzz at the treble end. I am thinking about using a radius block to take the frets above the 12th down a little to see if that helps.

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[fender3x]

This one has been a bit of a pain to get set up. I had leveled the frets using the "12th fret taper" method (see the vid below starting around 7:38). Dan from the vid now starts his taper at the 9th fret, but I still do it from the 12th. Despite this, after setup I was either getting buzz or felt like the action was too high. Most of the buzz was coming from the high end of the fretboard, so...I did it again, this time just using sandpaper attached to a 12" radius block...which works a bit faster and is long enough for just the high-end frets.

I think it helped a little, but not that much, so I rechecked the relief, and discovered it had too much relief, so I flattened it a bit, and then lowered the action to where I had it previously. There was a little buzz, so I raised each saddle screw by one turn, and that seems to have done the trick.

It's now playing well with respect to buzz, but the strings are still a bit lively for my taste. It's fun to play around slapping it, particularly with the bridge pickup turned up. But it also exacerbates the buzz when you dig in. The pickups aren't hearing the buzz, and I am guessing that it'll sound better for not-slapping once the strings settle down a bit.

One thing I will say for anyone worried about what shimming might do to sustain... This thing has TONS of sustain. I have contended for years that the only thing I have found that really improves sustain is a locking bridge. Most bass bridges don't really lock down the saddles, but this is my 2nd build using a Sung-Il BB-404 bridge, which is a relatively heavy locking bridge.



Once the saddle is adjusted for height and intonation, the screw on top of the saddle (with the red circle) locks it down to the bass-plate so that it won't move. I used it on a Precision, also with a paulownia body, and it also sustains well. It may be the new strings but this one seems even better. The only difference between the two is that I did string-through on the Precision, and string-on-top with this one. I had always heard that that string-through improves sustain, but if anything the sustain is better on this bass.

Sustain is not usually something I worry about much. I tend to think that most basses have more than enough sustain for most kinds of playing--and that a lot of right-hand technique is actually devoted to deadening the sustain. But I have done some experiments comparing locking bridges with normal F-style and even one G-style. The difference is not huge, but the locking bridges do noticeably better...so credit where it's due ;-)