Hot Rodded Fender Jazz for a good friend of mine, Corey Congilio
Folks, please don't try to do this at home... :)
Corey received this bass (traded for a box of smokes) with some Basslines pickups already installed (improperly) and had a really choked tone to it. Kind of hard to explain... He wanted a Bartolini preamp installed. Not much room in the cavity of a Fender Jazz bass, so I had to get out the router. I made a cavity large enough to house the preamp and the battery. It ended up turning out really nice. I can't for the life of me figure out why Roger Sadowsky routed out the front of Marcus Miller's bass when the back would have been just as easy. I'm not putting him down, I'm sure he had his reasons, his stuff is amazing... But I have a hard time getting past that pickgaurd...
Anyway, I hogged out the BACK of this Mexican Jazz bass. I would have been a little more reluctant to cut up a USA or vintage Jazz, but this one?
The install was a success and this bass turned out to be a monster. Awesome tone...
First off, whoever installed the pickups didn't bother to make the cavity larger. Jazz pickups come in different sizes. You need to measure before you purchase... Anyway, made the cavity bigger so the pickup could be adjusted. It was crammed in there tight and had to be pryed out with a screwdriver.
Control Cavity all routed out...
Electronics installed. Shielding painted on to the inside of the cavity...
All put back together and ready to rock!! (or funk, or swing, or tumbao)
- Active passive switch on volume knob
- Ballance knob
- Stacked Treble and Bass
- Mid knob with push/pull frequency selection
- Oh, and I had to cut a hole in the front for the output jack... A little less obtrusive than that Marcus Miller pickgaurd ... (Not dissin' Marcus either...)
