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So I'm wiring up a Jazz Bass for two stacked pots and a blend pot. I've got it all wired up and basically the bass puts out nothing when the blend pot is centered or rolled all the way forward (to the neck pickup). I did the first sensible thing and disconnected the neck pickup and wired it straight to a jack. It was putting out nothing. The pickup is a Bartolini and if you have any experience with Bart pickups you can replace/shorten the hot and ground which I had to do because I discovered the lead was cinched and had probably severed right under the pickup. I did what was necessary to repair it and was able to get a signal from the pickup. But when I wired it back in but I still get nothing at center/forward. I used the Fender schematic below for the stacked pots but instead of connecting the two stacks I connected them to the blend pot as per the second diagram. I'll get a couple pictures of my wiring in a minute.

Fuck me. I just found this:



I have the ground and hot reversed probably. Will report back.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand all that did was change the directions that the blend pot does/doesn't work. Which is now wrong. Hmm. Definitely gonna sleep on this now.

Bartolini's website has a diagram that says to route the pickups to the blend pot first. But I have no idea how to split each pickup to its vol/tone after that.

Can you post a link to the Bartolini page? I'm not sure how you could run separate volumes post-blender either. You could wire the tone controls to the inputs of the blend (as opposed to the volume) but that doesn't solve the problem.

A more top-down photo may make it easier to take a look at your wiring, but from what I can see it doesn't look like there's anything wrong. What happens when you wire the pups directly to the blender?

Here's the Bartolini diagram: http://www.bartolini.net/wp-content/upl ... iagram.pdf

Haven't tried wiring straight to the blender yet. I can shoot a new picture soon.

Yeah, it looks like the Bartolini layout blends the pickups before sending them to a preamp or the jack, so it wouldn't work if you wanted independent volume controls.

Try wiring directly to the blend and see what happens. If you have the same issue there's something wrong with either the pickup or the pot, and if it works there's something wrong (or there's a sneaky ground somewhere) with the pot for the neck pickup.

At the risk of being that guy, aren't independent volume controls and a blend pot redundant?

ChannelingHemingway wrote:Yeah, it looks like the Bartolini layout blends the pickups before sending them to a preamp or the jack, so it wouldn't work if you wanted independent volume controls.

Try wiring directly to the blend and see what happens. If you have the same issue there's something wrong with either the pickup or the pot, and if it works there's something wrong (or there's a sneaky ground somewhere) with the pot for the neck pickup.

At the risk of being that guy, aren't independent volume controls and a blend pot redundant?

Gotcha.

Yes. But the idea is not having to turn either pickup completely down. I'm wiring this up for some goofy old dude.

Okay so I've thought about this a lot and talked to Bartolini. No one knows why it isn't working and seems to think it's redundant. But this really should be the same thing as wiring two pickups with separate volume and tone pots (like most Gibsons) and then having a blend pot instead of a three way switch. Which we know can be done because I've seen someone's SG that they modified to have a blend pot instead of a three way switch for recording purposes. Which I feel like I saw here but can't seem to find the post...