VomitHatSteve
Hat STYLE. Not contents.
Hello home recording boards!
Particularly observant posters may have noticed a few threads from me in the past few months saying things like "I want to build a pickup from scratch" or "soldering is stupid." Well with the advice I got in those threads I have finally completed my masterpiece! The Abomination!
The premise of this instrument is pretty simple: 3-man punk bands have about one more member than they really need. The guitarist/vocalist should really be covering bass duties as well.
To that end, I bought a short-scale jazz bass from Rondo, removed the A, D, and G strings, replaced them with E, A, and D strings from a guitar and tuned the whole thing to dropped D (D (bass) D (guitar) A D). I could now play power chords with one finger!
Unfortunately, the bass string didn't come through as loud as the guitar strings, so I decided a needed a new pickup. Here follows that tale...
I started by chopping a popsicle stick into fourths and gluing a column of 4 neodymium magnets between them.
I then wrapped that in wire a couple thousand times (as one does), soldered some slightly thicker wire to the ends, wrapped that a few times, neglected to take pictures of that whole process, and dipped the whole shebang in parafin wax.
I drilled holes in my bass underneat the low D string and set my pickup in there.
The pickup itself is held in place with duct tape
I drilled a couple extra holes in the pick guard and mounted an extra volume pot and guitar jack for the new pickup.
I then restrung it as before. This was actually the hardest part since an electric guitar's D string is a few inches too short to comfortably sit on a shortscale bass.
As you can see in the picture, the string is held on more by hope and eldritch dealings with abominations from beyond the stars than by physics.
(Oh and also a twisty tie...)
So that's what it looks like and how it was made. Here's how it sounds:
The only processing I applied to this was to normalize the volume. I just plugged in a FastTrack Pro, plugged the bass into the left channel and plugged the guitar into the right. (My plan for the rest of the evening is to play with tone!)
What do you think?
Particularly observant posters may have noticed a few threads from me in the past few months saying things like "I want to build a pickup from scratch" or "soldering is stupid." Well with the advice I got in those threads I have finally completed my masterpiece! The Abomination!
The premise of this instrument is pretty simple: 3-man punk bands have about one more member than they really need. The guitarist/vocalist should really be covering bass duties as well.
To that end, I bought a short-scale jazz bass from Rondo, removed the A, D, and G strings, replaced them with E, A, and D strings from a guitar and tuned the whole thing to dropped D (D (bass) D (guitar) A D). I could now play power chords with one finger!
Unfortunately, the bass string didn't come through as loud as the guitar strings, so I decided a needed a new pickup. Here follows that tale...
I started by chopping a popsicle stick into fourths and gluing a column of 4 neodymium magnets between them.
I then wrapped that in wire a couple thousand times (as one does), soldered some slightly thicker wire to the ends, wrapped that a few times, neglected to take pictures of that whole process, and dipped the whole shebang in parafin wax.
I drilled holes in my bass underneat the low D string and set my pickup in there.
The pickup itself is held in place with duct tape
I drilled a couple extra holes in the pick guard and mounted an extra volume pot and guitar jack for the new pickup.
I then restrung it as before. This was actually the hardest part since an electric guitar's D string is a few inches too short to comfortably sit on a shortscale bass.
As you can see in the picture, the string is held on more by hope and eldritch dealings with abominations from beyond the stars than by physics.
(Oh and also a twisty tie...)
So that's what it looks like and how it was made. Here's how it sounds:
The only processing I applied to this was to normalize the volume. I just plugged in a FastTrack Pro, plugged the bass into the left channel and plugged the guitar into the right. (My plan for the rest of the evening is to play with tone!)
What do you think?
