Forum Menu: Forum Home | Guitar | Acoustic Guitar | Bass | Clips & Pics
Need help wiring this bass
Submitted by guitarkid101 on Mon, 03/10/2008 - 21:23.
Hi all, I made this bass last year as a project but never got round to wiring it and im not sure how to go about it. Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated :D
sorry about the picture size :P
Hi, sorry I took so long but I needed to check something out. I recognize those Peavey pups; I had a pair myself but gave them to another GCSE student for his project. Pity I didn't look too closely at them before I did...
Anyhoo, those Super Ferrites appeared on a number of Peavey basses like the T-20, Foundation and others. The central point here is whether they're single coils or humbuckers. Owner reviews are all over the place but I have downloaded Peavey's manual for the Foundation Bass and they say they're single coils.
In this case, the wiring from the pups should be a straightforward red wire ("hot" or "start") and either black or bare wire ("ground" or "finish"). If the pup wiring contains red, green, white and black then you do have humbuckers after all. No big deal, just twist the green and white wires and solder them together and the pups will operate in series.
Either way, you're then in position to wire this in the classic "Fender Jazz" V/V/T setup (your guitar even has Jazz Bass knobs; the tone is the small one). Your pots are 500k instead of the Jazz's 250k but your pups are probably beefier (500k are typical for humbuckers). Hopefully, the diagram for a Jazz bass on Guitarelectronics makes sense:
http://www.guitarelectronics.com/product/WDUSS2101
Basically, the red wires from each pup to the centre tags of each of the vol pots. Wire the left tags (looking at them upside-down) of the vol pots together and run a wire from the nearest of them to the centre tag of the tone pot. Run a further wire from there to the "tip" tag of the jack socket. The right-hand tags of the pots, the "ground" or "finish" wires of the pups and the sleeve of the jack socket all need to be soldered together and fed to the base plate of your bridge to earth it.
As the diagram suggests, a capacitor is needed on the tone pot between right tag and ground. For guitar, 0.047 µF (microfarad) is fairly common but, for bass, you might want 0.1 µF to roll off more brightness. I notice that a lot of the harness for the pots is still there. If it looks well-soldered and in the right order, stick with it. One other thing, I'm hoping that two of those pots are log (or audio) taper for volume and the other one is linear taper for tone. A log pot for tone (sometimes happens even with factory basses) will turn your treble cut into an on/off switch rather than a smooth adjustment.
Come back to me if you need more help.
BTW, I forgot to say. That's a nice project, there; thru-neck and all. You can build for me when you have some spare time (I'm a lefty, remember :) )
Post new comment