Wednesday, October 14, 2009

change the tone



Jim B. brought us his 5 string Modulus bass the other day. He wasn't pleased with the overall sound and told us he was looking for more warmth, more clarity and more fullness. As Gary is fond of saying: "You give me adjectives, I'll give you answers." Of course we looked under the hood first and, whaddya know? What the hell is that? Also, it did have a lot of knobs and, while many controls and switches are not necessarily a sign of less than appealing tone, simplicity does have a habit of cleaning things up. We ended up removing the original motherboard and running the perfectly good Bartolini pickups through an Aguilar OPB-3 onboard preamp. We also used one of the existing switches to make it possible for Jim to run in active mode or bypass the preamp altogether. This bass sounds great now.

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