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Internal boosters/meet Eric's mustang

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 3:17 am
by aen
This is Eric's mustang bass.

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As you can see, dude is a fan of my work, I dont know why. Anyway, he commissioned me to install a pair of boosters in his bass, one for a clean boost, and the other to OVERDRIVE the motherfucker. So this is kind of how I did it.

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First I made two boosters. Actually, I made 4, but two of them are for someone else! That's the easy part.

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Then I replaced the stupid wimpy jack with a big expensive stereo jack, for the power switching.

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Eric had already routed a spot under the pickguard, so all I had to drill was mounting holes for the toggles and pots. I totally eyeballed it.

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NOt really sure what I was trying to portray with this photo, but it seemed important enough at the time, so I post it now.

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Hooray! The pot fit in the hole!

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Hooray! the pots and switches all fit in the holes, and in the route! They are wired in series, right after the vol. and tone control. Both are trewly bypassed via the toggles.

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It's not pretty in there.

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After a whole lot of coaxing wires through little holes and twisting and grunting, I got the motherfucker wired up.

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There were literally six ground wires coming to the jack. One from the battery, one to the circuit, one from the bass's pots, one from the boosters pots, one form the bridge. If I were to do it again, I would try to link osme of those up before the jack. Speaking of which, the jack was a bitch to get in the route, the Switchcraft stereo jacks get pretty wide.

I tried it out, using the SECOND booster as the master volume/clean boost, and than slamming it with the FIRST booster cranked to topple into overdrive. For electronic nerd types- I substituted 1uf caps for the traditional .1uf in the LPB circuit in an effort to preserve low end presence. In my (limited) experience when you start getting gainy, you can lose bass with .1 caps. Anyway, the 1uf seemed to represent the lows and highs quite well.

I called Eric and instead of "Hello" he said "Is it done?" Kind of like when my daughter woke up at 1230 am on (technically) Christmas morning and asked if Santa had been here yet. SO I said yeah, and dude came over, tried it out through the cock-sucking POD amp fake-o-fier and approved.

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ON the way out he saw something else he liked:

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Re: Internal boosters/meet Eric's mustang

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 1:18 pm
by jrmy
Fuh-riggin' SWEET! :rock: :rock: :rock:

Goddamn it Aen, why can't you live in New England, so I can get you to do crazy mods to my bass, and then come over to try it out?

Re: Internal boosters/meet Eric's mustang

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 2:53 pm
by aen
Economics and family ties owudl be the main two reasons I guess.

Re: Internal boosters/meet Eric's mustang

Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 11:11 pm
by smile_man
Wait a second, you built a fucking Shiva into his bass? :?:

Re: Internal boosters/meet Eric's mustang

Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 2:35 pm
by aen
No, he;s got the prototype on his board though. I just put two clean boosters in.