A little over a year ago, I replaced the pickups in my Fender Precision Bass. I was lacking something in the tone of the instrument with the stock pickups. It was my first foray into customizing any of my instruments.

Highly technical content coming…

The replacement pickup I chose was the Lindy Fralin P-Bass replacement. It was recommended to me by this cat at Carmine Street Guitars in New York. After doing a little research, I learned that these things are hand-wound (10 thousand turns of copper wire) and have a rich and vintage tone. I hoped that they would give me what I was missing. After Lindy filled my order (small shop that builds these things… they don’t even take credit cards…), I set about soldering them into my bass. I liked the tone I got. I loved even more that I didn’t cook anything beyond function by overheating it with the soldering iron. My friend Jason thinks nothing of modifying his vintage Fender amps, getting in them with a soldering iron and switching out components. I’m good with pickups, but I don’t have the guts to start tinkering with my amps just yet.

Soon after I installed the Fralins, I noticed that when I touched the magnet poles without touching the strings, I got this popping sound followed by a buzzing noise, like there was a grounding problem. Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t hear the noise, but it drove me nuts anyway. When I would record the instrument, every now and then I’d hear that pop. Damn it! I contacted Evan Gluck, who runs New York Guitar Repair and he agreed to see me on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. He went through my whole instrument and just couldn’t beat this buzz! Arrgh!!! In the process, he replaced almost everything in the circuit, which is pretty simple. Pots, jack and capacitor. He even thought it had been wired strangely for a Precision Bass, so he re-wired it to the classic configuration. No luck. To the guy’s credit, he didn’t charge me for anything but the parts, because he didn’t find the problem. A call he made to Lindy the following day yielded some interesting information. Precision Bass pickups just do that. Huh? Never noticed that before. How could I have missed that?

In the year and half that’s passed since that day, I’ve lived with the pickup idiosyncrasy. I also was living with a more limited tone control sweep. Maybe it was the new pickups that I hadn’t had a chance to get used to, but I could swear I had a greater sweep of tone possibilities with tone control when I had the stock Fender pickup installed. Hmm…. I had much more important things to worry about in 2007. Now that I don’t, I decided to start obsessing about my bass tone again.

Last week, I finished a piano track for a new song called “The Strings.” It went so well that I had plenty of energy left, so I grabbed the bass and was going to add that part as well. When I established a gain structure for the bass, I heard the infernal pop/buzz in my headphones along with a new hum that I hadn’t noticed before. Damn it! These Fralins sound great, but they might be more trouble than they’re worth. I also started to wonder if Evan’s rewiring of my bass had anything to do with it. And what was up with that tone control anyway? Then it hit me. Did he use the right capacitor for the filter circuit? The way a tone control works on a Precision Bass is that as you turn the control down, more of the high frequency information in the signal is sent to the ground, which gives you the “low” tone. It just filters out more of the highs. I looked up the P-Bass wiring diagram on the Fender site and found that the capacitor should be rated at .05 mF. I opened the bass and discovered that Evan had used a .02 or something. I had the math straight in my head when I first looked at it, but suffice it to say for now that I figured out where all of my tone sweep went. It would’ve worked on a Stratocaster, but this is a Precision Bass.

I went to Radio Shack, which used to be one of my favorite places as a kid. I used to love looking at all the project boards and chassis and components, with all of the possibilities that lay in knowing how to hook things together the right way. (I almost became an electrical engineer, but it left too little time for the bass. True story.) Today, however, you go to Radio Shack for a goddam cell phone battery. Adding to the problem was that there were no electrical supply stores left, it seemed. I had to try Radio Shack.

As a sort of relic, a legacy symbol, they still sell loose components. They sell capacitors like Dunkin’ Donuts still sells donuts. Few people actually buy them, but they have to keep them around anyway or else the joint wouldn’t even make sense from a marketing perspective. I couldn’t find a single .05 mF capacitor in the entire drawer. The guys working there didn’t know what a capacitor was, which I predicted. I was hosed. Where would I get the tone sweep I wanted? I would have to order it on the Internet and wait for the time it took to be delivered. God, I don’t have the patience for that! When I got home, I remembered that Evan gave me my old parts when he rebuilt the electronic portion of my bass. There, on the old pot in a box somewhere, was a .05 mF capacitor that I desoldered and then reused. I also wired the bass the way it was originally and reinstalled the old ¼ inch jack. Even that fit better. I reinstalled the Fender pickup and put everything back together.

I tested the bass and despite the limitations of the stock pickup that originally bothered me, it worked fine and my tone sweep was back. Then I noticed that touching the poles made the same grounding noise! I also reproduced the hum. Lindy was right. They just do that. I decided that my ears are just getting better. All this recording will do that. I hear everything. I may not hear what you’re saying in the next room, but I’ll hear a 60 cycle hum poking through the noise floor, regardless of whether it shows up on the VUs.

I tried other basses in a music store. Same deal. Fascinating. I tried a Jazz Bass. A little better, but I just love the P-Bass too much. It’s really my axe.

So now the Lindy Fralins are back in, with the original tone circuit this time, and I’m awaiting the delivery of some no-hole pickup covers. If I can’t touch the poles, I won’t get that pop and buzz. That’s my theory anyway. Maybe it’ll even look interesting. How many guys have no-hole covers on their Precision Basses? We’ll CP is the only one I can think of! Nice. The hum is something I’ll try to cancel as best I can by adjusting pickup height. They will buck some of the hum if the two pieces are working together.

I’ll bet the hum isn’t even that bad. I’m just a total P-Bass tone freak.