FrankenBass audio sample

So... the P pickup sounds pretty good.  It's loud and aggressive.  The J pickup is thin and tinny.  Oh well, I got me self a functional 24 fret P bass now.  Thanks Dan, for not making me show my terrible bass skills.

Franken Bass... The Bridge of No Return

I took the bass to Guitar Center and talked to their Luthier a while.  He recommended just moving the bridge, which is what I ended up doing.  

I took the bridge off, and moved it up about an inch.  It's right on the J pickup, but that's where it needs to be to get the intonation sounding right.  You can see the five holes where the bridge use to be, and there was an impression left in the finish where the bridge used to be.  I simply lined it up so it was even with the old impressions to line it up.  Drilling through finish sucks, if you don't do it right, the drill will skip along the surface and your hole won't be in the right place.

To get around this, I used a small nail to start the hole.  You just position it where you want it, and then tap it a few times just to get through the finish, then pull it out.  Start with the smallest bit you have, and work your way up to the size you need..

The wood colored splotch just under the bridge is the hole for a ground wire.  This wire must be electrically connected to the bridge, which is electrically connected to the strings.  I don't remember the exact reason for this, but I believe it acts somewhat as a noise shield.

Funny story, in high school I used to play music in Will's basement.  There were metal strips running under the carpet, and if you stood on the strip and touched your strings, you'd get shocked.  If you touched the strings and a microphone at the same time, you'd get shocked.  It was cool though, and it didn't affect me in any way in any way in any way.

Anyway, this is the finished bass...  As expected, the J pickup is not very loud, and it's kinda tinny.  The P pickup sounds great.

Maybe next project can be winding a super hot J pickup with a low pass filter... I dunno.

Franken Bass!

I have 2 bass guitars sitting around.  One is an 80's Fender PJ bass that I bought 8 or so years ago.  I tried to refinish the body and... well.. it was kind of a disaster.  I did learn a lot though, so that's something.  Number one... if there's a wood veneer on the body... don't remove it.  Number two... stripping paint sucks.

It may look okay from a distance, but I promise you, I did a terrible job, AND I wired it improperly.  I had purchased a pearloid pickguard to go on there, but the body was some weird size, so I cut my own pickguard.


The second is a fender squier PJ bass that someone gave to my girlfriend because it's a POS with a terribly bent neck.  I tried to adjust the truss rod a few years ago and just ended up stripping out the adjustment bolt.  Oops.  The pictures here don't do the neck curvature justice... imagine the curve you see WITH strings pulling it farther.  The action close to the body was about 1/2''.  I was t

As you can see, it's as straight as Elton John

Last weekend I got all fired up about fixing it, so I decided that I was going to replace the truss rod.  In order to do that, I need to remove the fingerboard.  I was a bit worried about damaging it... but the neck is shot anyway, so I decided to go for it.  I learned that the best way to do it is to use a clothes iron on the steam setting to loosen the glue, and then for VERY slowly to avoid damaging the fragile fingerboard.

I sat there for about 2 hours, playing Deus Ex, refilling the iron as needed, making sure things didn't burn, and prying the fingerboard a bit more every 10 minutes or so.  At first, I was making good progress... the finger board was coming up clean and straight... but once I got to the 7th fret it cracked.  By that point I was able to look under the fingerboard where the truss rod *should* be... but it was completely sealed up!  No way to remove the truss rod.  I kept removing the fingerboard for a while for the practice, but eventually gave up and just pulled it off.

Truss rod?  Where are you?!?

Well... foo on that.  I pulled the neck off of the bass I had refinished and fit right in the neck pocket of the Squier.  Wooo!  I also took the opportunity to take the Seymour Duncan Basslines pickups off of the other bass and replace the terrible stock Squier pickups.

Hooray!  Bass Geeetar!  Well... almost.  After I tried to set the intonation, it was a total wreck.  It's WAY flat.  It's so flat that I can't adjust the saddles far enough to get it in tune.  After the fact, I realized that the new neck is a 22 fret, and the old neck was a 20 fret.  The old neck is about an inch shorter.  I either need to move the bridge, or mod it in some creative way to make it work correctly...

Sovtek Mig-50 repair

Check out this beauty!  It's a Sovtek Mig-50 model 001 guitar head.  If you look closely, you'll notice that they misspelled "Presence".  I was told that this means that it's a rare first issue, which might explain why it doesn't work.

In Soviet Russia, guitar plays you.

This amp has been broken and in the possession of one of my bandmates for quite some time.  A month or two ago, he and his father attempted to fix it, and briefly succeeded by replacing a resistor (so I'm told).  The amp lasted for about 2 hours of play time before it just quit working again.  We're going to open it up and try to figure out what went wrong.

Removed the wooden cabinet.  This is the equivalent of a circuit in it's underwear.  Stay tuned for bare circuits

You can see the output transformer on the left, the power transformer on the right, 5881 power tubes, and the two cans are power supply capacitors.  Behind the output transformer hides 3 12AX7 preamp tubes.


Turning over the chassis revealed the problem immediately.  Two of the power resistors are scorched, and one is completely missing.  There's another less scorched resistor out of frame.  We tried for an hour or so to find a schematic for this amp online, but to no avail. This is the closest thing we could find (http://music-electronics-forum.com/attachments/8148d1266759648-mig-50-oem-full-crop-print-landscape.jpg), but the resistors in the schematic and on the board (R34, R27, etc) don't match the schematic.  I traced the components by hand to figure out which resistors had burnt out according to the schematic.  I found another Mig 50 schematic which the same power supply design which actually listed the power rating for the resistors, and hopefully this is going to work.

R34?!?  Where are you R34?

I have every value of 1/8 watt through hole resistors you can buy, but I don't have any of these mammoth 2 and 3 watt resistors.  Lucky for me, Digi Key exists, and I found all of the parts I needed, and a few spares for about $7.

Now, we play the waiting game...