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Question for Curtisa


tucson

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Hi Curtisa, you helped me out last week and I wanted to ask something if I could. Everything is working as it should on my bass. Tone adjusts fine, pickups on and off with the switches etc...  The thing is if you have both pickups on it sounds great but if you switch off the bridge p/u it gets a brighter more trebley tone. You can tap on the p/u's and tell the neck is on bridge off bet it's brighter than with both on. Does that sound funky to you? Also is there a way to make the sound, everything overall, warmer or bassier? It's got highs for days but lacks bottom end in general. Thanks in advance for any help!

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Single coil pickups in isolation will naturally sound brighter than two singles in series, as you have when both neck and bridge are on.

Seems that sound examples of the SB 400 are hard to come by, but this video of a SB 350 seems to suggest that the neck pickup is fairly bright sounding anyway (at about 8:50). Is that anything like what you're experiencing?

You mentioned in the other thread that the pickups were re-wound, so you're probably stuck with whatever the pickup winder made. If they were re-wound as per the spec of the original units, then perhaps that's just the way they're meant to sound? If they were rewound to some other spec, who knows?

Does the neck pickup sound like it's working correctly compared to the bridge (ignoring the overall brightness), or does it sound super-anaemic, even to the point of being hard to tell if its even on when both neck and bridge are on?

 

1 hour ago, tucson said:

Also is there a way to make the sound, everything overall, warmer or bassier?

In a passive guitar you're pretty much limited to making things "less treble-y" in order to give the impression of "more bass-y". That effectively means adding something that the tone control already does, ie cut some of the highs back. It can be fun and cheap to experiment with, but don't expect Megabass (tm)-like differences. Beyond that you're stuck with replacing the pickups with something with more oomph or using some kind of active eq/preamp...or turning the bass up on your amp ;)

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Hey Curtisa thanks for the response. After checking that video I think it sounds pretty much like it's supposed to. On that fly guitars web site they had sound clips for a 400. http://www.flyguitars.com/sounds/1971_SB-400[both10-10]f_rw.mp3

Also this video at about 6:00 minutes in

Once again Thank You for your help and knowledge!

Edited by tucson
mistake
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