The customer had made a bass guitar some years ago, while at school. It had been unused for several years, but he had recently tried to play it. Unfortunately he found that the electrics weren't working and he had no recollection of how it should have been wired. He came to me to get it working.
I was slightly surprised when he turned up with just the scratchplate with the pickups and controls attached - no guitar! Anyway it didn't stop me doing the work. On examination, the wiring was a bit strange, plus one of the pots was broken. I suggested that I would get three new pots and wire it up as a Fender Jazz Bass, with a volume control for each pickup and a common tone control. In addition to this, the coil wire of one of the pickups was not properly soldered to the hookup wire, so this needed repair. Final testing was done by holding the scratchplate close to the vibrating strings of one of my basses and checking that a signal was being generated! The customer followed up with a text message: "Works like a dream. Thanks Duncan".
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As the title says, the customer had a Fender Precision Bass that he wanted setting up. He was particularly keen to get the intonation correct. I did a full setup including truss rod adjustment, action adjustment, pickup height adjustment and intonation adjustment, The intonation in particular was in need of sorting out, just as the customer had flagged up.
A customer wanted a pickup fitted to his Guild guitar. I had previously fitted a K&K Pure Mini pickup to one of his other guitars and he was very happy with it, so it was a simple decision to go with the same pickup. This type of pickup uses three small transducers which are attached to the bottom of the guitar's bridge plate. It is a passive design, so has no need of a battery. It also has no on-board controls, which some may see as a disadvantage. I've generally found that acoustic guitar pickups don't always do a great job of reproducing the sound of the guitar, This one does a good job and is relatively inexpensive.
Installation of this pickup is a little bit unusual in that the best results are obtained by supergluing the transducers onto the underside of the bridge plate. Needless to say that if you ever want to remove the pickup, the chances are that it will be destroyed in the process! |
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