Ok, I got the Custom Shop pickup on Friday and wasted no time installing it. I also came across a Seymour Duncan "Quarter pound" bridge pickup that I forgot I had and decided to install that instead of the Fender "Original", as I thought it would be a better match to the Custom Shop.
I also forgot to mention that I installed a Fender "period correct" threaded saddle bridge, which was what they used on the '62 Jazz Bass.
And this is about as clean and scratch-free you're going to ever see this control plate (spoiler: it's already got light scratches on it from rubbing off fingerprints for photos).
I just happened to have a full set of flat-top barrel knobs, which almost never happens. I have a whole mess of knobs around here, and usually, if I need four, I've got three, and if I need three, I've got two. Got lucky with that... What I didn't get lucky with were the pots I used. I have drawer full of pots in one of my parts organizers, and 250K pots were scarce. I only had 3, and they had all been used in something else. One of them had a .047 cap soldered to it already, so I considered that a bonus, until I went through the meticulous process of stringing and setting up the bass (more on that in a minute) only to find out that it was completely dead.
I took that as a good sign. No signal is easier to diagnose than a buzzy noisy signal. I figured I probably just forgot to solder one of the wires, or something. All the cavities in this bass were shielded with a ground wires going into the control cavity, which made for more wires than I'm used to having to deal with, and it would have been easy to overlook something. Well, the wiring and all the solder joints were fine, but I discovered that the tone pot was
broken. The wafer that the lugs were mounted to was cracked, and the wiper was clicking and scraping against something. I hadn't noticed this when I soldered it. I think when it got pressed into the control cavity against some wires, it may have been enough to further break the piece.
Anyway, long-story-short, it turns out the other two pots were bad as well, and I ended up replacing them all with 500k pots. Doesn't really matter. It's still got a .047 cap.
Setting up a fretless bass is a little trickier than setting up a fretted one. First, I had to set the intonation, which was an uncertain affair. I believe you should check intonation against the fretted/fingered note, and not the harmonic, but on a frettless, where just rolling your finger slightly can make the tuner register a sharp note, it's hard to be certain that your finger is
exactly on the right spot (or maybe I was down with OCD... Yeah, you know me). But I think I got it set as accurately as humanly possible without a strobe tuner.
Next, I had to sand off some material from the bottom of the bone nut to compensate for the lack of frets. The only way to do that is to sand it down a little, and then put it back in the neck, tune up the bass, and see if the first notes are sharp... Lather, rinse repeat. Again, like with the intonation, it was a matter of getting it as close as possible.
I had set the action "roughly" to something close to what I wanted it to be before I started working on the nut, and I was to find out later, after everything else had been dialed in, that you have to make some compromises when it comes to action. You're
going to get a little buzzing from the strings vibrating against the wood. That's part of the "mwah" sound that fretless basses are known for, but you don't want too much of that. You need to have more space for string excursion on a fretless, I think, since it's making direct contact with the wood, which means the action needs to be a little higher than I'm used to. Not so much that it's a struggle, just something to get used to.
I debated for a long time whether to put round-wound, or flat-wound strings on it. I had a set of both DR Lo-Riders and Ernie Ball cobalt flats (best sounding flat-wound bass strings on the planet IMO). I had decided I was going to put flays on it for the longest time, but the closer it got time to make a decision, I knew I wouldn't be happy until I heard it with rounds on it (what Jaco used), so I put the DRs on it (but now I want to hear what it sounds like with the flats!).
Ok, so what does it sound like?
In a word... It sounds like a monster! The CS in the neck and the SDQP in the bridge really work well together. They're both aggressive sounding pickups with similar output. With the round-wound strings, it's got all the growl and ring that a Jazz bass should. It gets deep and hits hard, with the added chorusey, mwha character of a fretless. And it sustains
forever! I didn't mention anything about neck fitment earlier (always a risk when mating different bodies and necks together), but this neck fit the pocket nice and snug, like they were made for each other. I think that's a big factor. You can't even put this bass in a stand with the amp on. The strings just ring and ring until a feedback swell slowly starts to develop. This bass does NOT need a Badass bridge!
Playing it in tune is more of a challenge than of a fretted bass, of course, but it's not as hard, or frustrating as I thought it would be. I've got pretty good pitch, and it didn't take long before I found I was playing the bass without looking at my hands. I always did drift off the notes, but I could
hear it. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to hear if a note were a semi-tone off, but I can. The margin for error isn't quite as narrow as I imagined it would be. You have a fair degree of latitude before the note sounds "wrong".
I haven't been able to put this thing down for long since I got everything dialed in (it's taken me a while to write this!), but I took a couple of quick shots so y'all can see it completed. I'm going to take some "beauty shots" later, but not till I get some more playing out of my system!
It takes some doing extracting the text from the PDFs of the threads I saved, and I have to undo the formatting when I paste it in here, so it takes a bit of time.
