Bass wiring- jazz with music man

TheBeed

Newbie
Messages
20
hey again, this is now a wiring question for my purple sg style bass project, hopefully soon to be started.
but for now what im thinking of is a volume  and tone for the jazz, and volume and tone for the music man , both wired to the jack.
this would be right wouldnt it?
and are there any, not too complicated wiring ideas i could consider?
 
Yup.  They wired in parallel so the volumes act independently.  It's just like a regular SG or LP guitar, but with no switch.  Look at one of those schematics.  Instead of the switch, solder all three wires together that would go to the switch.
 
Actually I think most LPs have the volumes wired so they're interactive.  This is not how you want to wire a Jazz bass!  You can't turn on only one pickup if you wire it this way.

Gibson made them both ways, though.

Use a J schematic
 
There's been about 3 dominant, diverse J-Bass wiring schematics.  There's the 2 vol., 1 tone.  There's the 1 vol., pan, 1 tone.  Finally, the '62 with concentric knobs for 2 volumes and 2 tones would work I guess, just forego the concentric knobs part.
 
Fender discontinued the 2 concentric knob configuration for a reason - the benefit for a tone on each pickup is minimal because of how the wiring is worked. now if you were to introduce diodes into the schemat so that the tone control was truly isolated for each pickup (keeping it from bleeding highs off the other pickup) then I'd say it's worth the time to wire-up

mark this up as a lessons learned exercise by Fender - V/V/T or V/B/T is less of a headache to wire and results in an almost identical sound IMO

all the best,

R
 
Introducing diodes won't help...  :icon_scratch:  You'd need some transistors and a battery, to start with.
 
my bad then - I thought it was a diode that allowed flow in only one direction. the idea is to allow signal to the tone knob from only the pickup it's intended for

the original Fender design allows tone control to bleed over across pickups, essentially robbing tone from a pickup you might have fully open with the other pickup you might have fully rolled off

having a means to prevent this 'backwash' effect would make the dual V/T configuration usable - even desirable- IMO

all the best,

R
 
Yep, diodes only let signal by in one direction, but that's definitely not what you want to do... first of all a guitar signal is so weak that the diode will probably just kill it entirely, and second of all your guitar signal goes both ways... if you stick a diode in its way, you'll only hear the top half of the waveform.  All peaks, no valleys.  It'll sound like a broken fuzzbox or something.  For this sort of thing you want a buffer, which doesn't really let any signal by, it just looks at the signal and copies it.  So you can do whatever you like to the copy and it won't affect the rest of the circuit.

Anyway we're getting off topic.  Here's the 62 wiring STDC mentioned, looks like it should work:

JazzBass62_wir.jpg


Jaco played one of these by the way, so maybe that extra knob is useful after all :)
 
hmmmm ok i get the first guys replies,,, but did it go into regular jazz basses after that? :s, well i was more thinking of a neck jazz pick up with a music man, so wanted to know wiring for that, i looked at les paul, sg wiring, and i  see what you mean, i could translate that to bass guitar wiring im sure,  but if i had 3 way switch, what could it possibly do to the combos? or wud it be best without for a bass?
 
Switches can be useful for bass.  I have 2 volumes, a three-way toggle, and master tone.  However, I find I leave it in the middle most of the time and roll each volume for a mix.  The switch is handy for the tuner.  It likes the bridge pickup more.
 
You could wire a 3-way easily.  For that, just follow a LP schematic exactly.  I think that would be a pretty useful layout for a bass, actually... but I'm not a bassist so you might want a second opinion :)

Edit: If you're confused by a 4-conductor MM pickup, you just want to solder two leads together and use the other two as though they went to a Jazz pup.  The pickup mfgr should tell you which two to solder.
 
wire it up Vol/Blend/Tone and put a 3-way switch between your blend and the MM pickup to toggle between Series/Single/Parallel mode. it's a common way to do this setup where the hot lead from the 3-way is the input into the blend for the MM

all the best,

R
 
Back
Top