Building Basses vs. Building Guitars

The main thing as you already know you want 2 pups and active/passive, is to figure out how many bands of control and how many knobs/switches you want.
 
As a reference:
My Lakland I sold was 2 pup active/passive. With it I had 4 knobs and 1 switch. The switch controlled active passive. The knobs were vol, blend, and 2 concentric knobs: 1 handling treble and bass, the other mid and mid freq.

My Dingwall is 3 pup active/passive with 5 knob 1 switch. The switch is active/passive. I knob is vol, another a rotary pup selector (bridge, bridge middle in series, bridge middle in parallel, and neck), the remaining 3 are treble, middle, bass.

My Stingray is active only with 1 pup. 3 knob. Vol, treble and bass.

All the others are passive only.
 
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With two pickups, quadraphonic channels, at least one vol, and one tone per channels plus some filters, probably not enough knobs.
 
apparently the sliver thing just south of the bridge was a 4 way joystick / pan-pot for the quadraphonic pickups. So ... four knobs in one!
 
Funny, that reminds me of when I was a teenager and saw that poster of Van Halen on stage (I think it was the US Festival) and wondering how those guys could stand right in front of those walls of 4x12s & 1x15s, and not go completely deaf after one show. I was clueless to the fact that they were stage props. In fact I thought they were the PA speakers, and wondered how the vocal mic didn't feed back.
😄
 
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