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Yeah I sure will. Making a neck isn't really that difficult, Gibson and Fender still use the old style truss rods that require a curved rout and then fillets with the same curve, but double acting truss rods are now widely available and cheap and only require a flat bottomed rout. Fret gauges are available also for marking the fret slots, back in the day you had to measure each fret position from the nut and some of the measurements go into hundredths of an inch. Last but not least, fret cutting jigs are available and highly recommended, not cheap but you will find that once you have built one guitar you will want to do it again, thus the Luthier tools will eventually pay for themselves. I'm going for the headless design because I once owned a Hohner B2A which is a copy of the famous Steinberger bass and the strings have a ball at each end and the adjustment is very fine, I only tuned it once and never had to do it again
Marko - do know anything, anything at all?
What do you know about matching pots to pickups based on resistance of the pot and pickup type?
I came across an article on a guitar repair site where they said that, due to pickup properties, a person might want to use 500k pots with humbucker type pickups and 250k pots with single coils. The argument was that split coils sacrifice some treble to avoid hum, and the 500k pot allows more of the treble through from pickup to the amp. Treble attenuation is greater in 250k pots, which is not an issue when using brighter single coils. Is there really an audible difference?
I'm planning on swapping out the original pots on a MIM Fender jazz bass, so I'd appreciate your well-considered and deeply-learned thoughts. Cheers.
Ditto to what Sid said. Also any recommendations on capacitors would help. I've heard they make a huge difference for only a couple dollars. Paper in oil, ceramic. And the different values of them. .47, .22, .1
There's a general rule of thumb when it comes to potentiometers, 500k ohms for volume on Humbuckers, 250k ohms for volume for single coils and 250k for all tone pots, although Gibson have used 300k and 100k respectively. Pots have three tabs, the input from the pick up goes to the left hand tab, the output to the middle tab and the right hand tab goes to earth, as the knob is turned it gradually feeds the signal to earth until finally it cuts out. Tone pots don't feed the signal to earth but filter it through a capacitor, the most common values being between 0.001 mfd and 0.01 mfd, a higher value cap will cut more treble than a lower value cap and since caps are only pennies it's worth buying a few and experimenting, Allparts is a great source for caps. There are two types of pots, Logarithmic or Audio Taper and Linear, log pots are more in tune with the way the human ear works so I recommend you always use logarithmic pots. Sid, I'd recommend leaving your Mexican pots well alone, they'll all be 250k log with a 0.02 mfd cap. I'm going to start a thread about Humbuckers and single coils as people seem to be confused about them
Thanks Marko. The reason for wanting to swap out the Mexican pots is that I have put Fender N3 Noiseless pickups in (these are a humbucker type with stacked coils) and the resulting sound was dish-rag limp. (Disappointing as the N3 is the pickup Fender puts in their American Deluxe jazz basses.) So something is not happy in there and it should not be the pickups.
Seems like you need 500k log pots for the vols but leave the tone pot as is, keep an aye open for my Humbucker v single coil thread
Ok Marko, need your opinion on something. A 6 string bass with a 5 string neck, is that doable?
I have a 6 string that was originally a 5-string neck. It's a neck through dual truss rod bass. Strings are real tight at the nut.
Only reason I ask is because I read that Dream Theater bassist John Myung uses the Music Man Bongo 6 string, but he has a 5 string neck on it. Kinda got me thinking if I could do that with mine…
John Myung probably got the nice people at Ernie Ball to do the swap, obviously the neck heel is wider on a six string as is the neck socket, you would have to shim the sides of the neck socket, also you would have to replace the neck with one of identical scale
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