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Originally this bass had a two-way active tone control system, which was pretty common for the era. Unfortunately it was noisy and ate batteries at an alarming rate, so it had to go. I'm a fan of passive pickups, so rather than replace the preamp with a better model, I removed it completely. As is my wont, I didn't wire up a passive tone control either - I like most pickups run "wide open" without any crude passive circuitry to load down the pickup's output.

Hardly content with this, I wired up each of the pickups to it's own output jack socket for "stereo" operation. This isn't real stereo, as bass frequencies are perceived by the listener as coming from the middle of the stereo field anyway, but what it does enable me to do is process the two pickups separately. I'm a fan of crunchy rock bass tones, a la Rickenbacker 4000 series basses, but the low end of a bass guitar usually suffers with any kind of overdrive. So I process the two pickups separate from each other, compress the neck pickup and overdrive the bridge pickup and then mix them together during mixdown. Apparently this is similar to the way Billy Sheehan approaches his amplification. An added benefit of this approach is you can record both signals separately, letting you change the bass/treble mix at any time in the recording/mixdown proceedure, without having to resort to extra EQing.

To do:

Replace pickups
The stock EMG Select pickups are, at best, bland. Here I ran into the problem of finding bass pickups that are the same size and with the same string spacing (other than the active EMGs). I've been speaking to Peter Biltoft of Vintage Vibe Guitars and he has offered to custom-make me a set of pickups to suit this bass. We've just about finished hammering out the details, so I should have a good set of pickups fitted soon.

A little wiring
Pots are still the stock miniature type, which are linear taper, so volume balancing between the two pickups can be a little tricky. I have some CTS ready to install when the pickups get here. I'll also replace the small three way switch with a Gibson style model.

New headpiece
Currently this bass only takes double-ball end strings, which are expensive and limit me in choice of brands and gauges. My idea is to make a new headpiece (where the strings are secured at the top of the neck), which incorporates allan bolts to clamp regular single-ball strings in place.

Refinish
The finish on this bass is a thick poly and is pretty scratched up in places. So, once I have the wiring sorted to my satisfactionand any unneccessary holes filled, I'll refinish. Colour - I'm not sure yet, as it will depend on how the body looks when it is stripped. If the wood is attractive enough, I may go for transparent blue, otherwise it'll be a solid, gloss black.