60's?? Vintage Starfire Bass

[Happy Face]

Attention Mellow One!

 

[SFIV1967]

Attention Mellow One!

@mellowgerman

 

[Minnesota Flats]

If there's room, I'd wrap a tuna salad sandwich in wax paper and stuff it in there next to the transformer...

 

[mavuser]

I got this exact bass in trade last weekend from a guy who had clearly bitten off more than he bargained for. I'm pretty sure nothing has changed but the strings from that auction.
Thankfully the neck is nice and straight, the frets are fine, the truss rod works and the action is more than acceptable for me with room to move down.
Unfortunately the wiring is a total mess. The pots don't really work at all and the big switch seems to be wired backwards between the pickups since one gets hotter as the other gets thinner, regardless of where the phase switch is set. The better news is the pickups sound great when the signal is actually coming through. The original transformer is wired internally to that mini toggle but its just wrapped up in a plastic bag bouncing around.
Since it's clearly never going back to stock, I'm thinking a walnut control plate on top will hide some of the more creative drilling that was done. I have no idea what to do about the strange placement of that pickup switch though.

bless you. and welcome.

So far, you seem to be barking up the right tree. regarding the pickup switch, I would simply extend your walnut control plate to cover the entire treble side of that bass, similar to the Phil Lesh "Big Brown" Starfire:

as far as the pickups and electronics, i'm not sure how far you plan to go with this, but...even if those Gibson pickups sound pretty good, I would remove them and sell them (along with the other Gibson parts), to reinvest back into the bass, with some sort of Guild Bisonic-type pair of pickups replacing them (or Alembic pickups). Especially if you will have a Phil Lesh type control plate...go with the flow and make it as much of a tribute towards that type of design as you can (just stick with 2 pickups though, and your original bridge and headstock). You don't need to go too crazy, just make it look right and sound right. It looks like the top of the original neck pickup (the only original pickup) cavity is showing behind the Gibson neck pickup (as would be expected)- you don't want that. So I would plan on installing 2 Bisonics, the bridge cavity will need additional routing, and both cavities will need damage control work done on the sides, from the Gibson work.

all existing electronics/components/wiring should be pulled, none of it looks original, although the "transformer" you speak of maybe is, that is the dreaded "suck switch" if so, and should be extracted for sure.

If you are not going to go Alembic, the most obvious options are Curtis Novack BS/DS Bisonics- each Bisonic is switchable from Bisonic to Dark Star, typically with a pull pot. Everyone's first choice, but they come at a price. You could get them non-switchable, and have a Novak Bisonic in the neck and Dark Star in the bridge, and save $40 per pickup (last I checked), as well as save on the cost and "talent" of the wiring and installation. wait until black friday and save 20% on Novaks Bisonics (I *THINK* -check with Novak). However if you have the huge control plate, and 2 Novaks, it would make a lot of sense to make them both switchable at that point (unless you were also doing some other wild things, in combo with the Novaks, which would somehow preclude the BS/DS switchability... that @mellowgerman should be along soon to suggest...)

If you just want to use the less expensive, non-switchable Guild reissue Bisonics (they are actually reissue Dark Stars), that come stock on current import Starfires (looks identical to vintage Bisonic and Novak, from the top- not the P-bass looking Guild Starfire pickup)...let me know as I have a pair of those from my 2014 GSR M-85-II, with less than 5 hours of use on them. You could always start with those, and upgrade to Novaks later- although I am not suggesting you do that, if you have the budget to hot rod it right now...but if you decide to, I will give you a great deal on those Guild pickups, especially considering the cause (and i'd make a donation to LTG)

How clean is the neck and headstock on this bass? That would largely dictate my level of investment on this, if it were me. Has the neck or headstock ever been broken/repaired? Good on you either way, for making it right.

 

[baddecisions]

No sign of a break, but those pickup routes are significantly wider than the original. I appreciate the pickup offer but I really like the sounds I'm getting for the time being, so I'm going to get it to a playable state (electronically) and decide on a potential overhaul later. I've got a pair of JTEX distillers in my parts box that were destined for a different bass, but might find a better home here instead. I'll have to see how they sound with these pickups.

 

[baddecisions]

And mellowgerman is correct. The paperclip is grounding the pickup ring.

 

[mellowgerman]

Hello and congrats on acquiring a cool project! I was actually going to suggest JTEX distillers. They are what I've settled on as my favorite of the active resonant filter preamps currently available (admittedly I've only had extensive first-hand experience with Alembic, ACG/JohnEast, and JTEX). I would think they should work just fine with these pickups and my guess would be that you can lose the step-up transformer all together, if you just boost the gain trim-pots on the JTEX distillers. I too would probably keep those Gibson pickups in this bass. Not that they're necessarily better than Bisonics or Alembics, but they're really cool and rare low-impedance pickups in their own right and I really liked the way they sounded in my Gibson Triumph bass. Can always remove them later if you decide you'd like to explore the Bisonic or Alembic paths.

That innards photo is pretty scary. The multicolored wires themselves may well be original (my Triumph contained a whole collection of rainbows wires), but the soldering work that was done in the retro-fit is terrifying and I'm not surprised the electronics aren't working properly. Where in the circuit is the transformer located? I'm assuming it must have been cut out of the original cable that would have come with the Gibson Recording bass that the rest of the electronics came from. As far as I know, they did not have an on-board transformer like the Triumph bass does.

 

[baddecisions]

Thanks! I'm excited to see it come together. The transformer is definitely cut out of a cable and is wired right next to the jack with a switch to take it in and out of circuit. The tone switch wiring seems to be almost directly transferred from the recording bass, but the pots are someone's misguided fix. I'm not totally sure the distillers are going to have enough gain on their own, but I can always add an active boost after the fact if it's needed. The first major piece of the project is remapping that tone switch wiring to a rotary that will be a little less of an eyesore and actually work right.

 

[mellowgerman]

A friend of mine paired normal Alembic low impedance pickups with JTEX Distillers with good results. I'll double-check with him to see if they needed anything else, but I don't believe they did. I've also paired an Epiphone JCB-1 low impedance pickup (from a Jack Casady signature bass) with a Distiller, leaving out the step-up transformer, which also worked well. It wasn't what I would call a particularly loud signal, but no quieter than a standard passive jazz bass.
Of course, not all low impedance pickups are created equal, so I'll be curious to see how it goes!

Regarding the pots in there, I wonder if they are the originals from the circuit... if they were replaced with "normal" 250k-1meg pots, that would explain why they're not functioning properly -- with the transformer wired at the output, those pots should have lower values to function properly, probably in the 10k-25k range.

 

[baddecisions]

Best I can work out, the clean one seems like it could be the original 2.5k ohm (maybe 5k? pn 70-977 date code 1969) for the bass control, the corroded pot is a 500k with a 1974 date code, and the volume pot is that black plastic cube. The more I think about it, I have no idea how this is going to respond once I get "proper" wiring in it.

 

[baddecisions]

I got the transformer out and sure enough it's the original hacked up cord.

The next trick is sorting out the wiring on these pickups. The neck pickup had wrong colored extension wires on it, but they were at least consistent.


Sorry to get deep into Gibson bass pickups here, but each pickup is a stacked humbucker made up of 2 coils with 3 taps each. So essentially you can select from 3 different levels. If you were really ambitious you could create an annoying number of combinations between the 2 pickups but I'm sticking with the original 3 for my own sanity. The taps are at
Red 50 ohms
Blue 106 ohms
Green 230 ohms
Brown is the common end.

On the bridge pickup, red and blue were swapped on one side (from the factory!) so both read 75 ohms which explains my strange switching behavior. I chose to remap that switching to a 4p3t rotary. The red and blue are intentionally swapped at the bottom left to fix the mislabeling
I also added grounds for the pickup rings with tiny ring terminals attached to the height adjustment screws.

The next project is modeling a control plate with CAD

And testing before I deal with the major surgery here

 

[Happy Face]

Otaku magic!

 

[baddecisions]

@mellowgerman do you recall if there was a big difference in output using the tone switch on your triumph? I've got the gain on the distillers just high enough that it doesn't clip on the pickups highest setting, but It feels like 3 different basses. One hot, one about normal, and one of that needs a whole other boost to be at a reasonable level in my headphone amp. I am really liking the tones it gives me, I just don't like that one of them is nearly unusable at the moment.

 

[chazmo]

Good luck with that abomination. I like your username.

 

[mellowgerman]

@mellowgerman do you recall if there was a big difference in output using the tone switch on your triumph? I've got the gain on the distillers just high enough that it doesn't clip on the pickups highest setting, but It feels like 3 different basses. One hot, one about normal, and one of that needs a whole other boost to be at a reasonable level in my headphone amp. I am really liking the tones it gives me, I just don't like that one of them is nearly unusable at the moment.

There was definitely a volume difference between the 3 settings, but I don't recall them being as drastic as you are describing. Much like with the Epi Casady signature bass, I found the 2 "lower" settings very useful and articulate, just with a shift in character, the second being a little more girthy and mid-forward. The 3rd setting was kind of starting to flirt with sledgehammer territory... maybe more useful for players who like roundwound strings (which I find to have less of that low-mid punch that flats inherently exhibit), but for me it probably would only have come into play if I really wanted to push my tubes into some overdrive. That said, those observations were in a fully passive context. Perhaps the active circuit makes the differences more pronounced somehow? Also, there may have been some changes made to the transformer specs between my Triumph bass and the Recording bass that your electronics came from? Hard to say

 

[Minnesota Flats]

The rest of you are to polite to do it, so I guess it's left t'me to address the elephant in the room so we can move on: I bet those electronics became available for scavenging after the headstock broke off the LP...

 

[baddecisions]

Minnesota Flats 100% chance a broken LP bass led to this. Nobody in their right mind would chop up two perfectly good vintage basses to make this.

Sledgehammer could be an appropriate description of the highest output even in it's currently gain challenged state. Looking back back at just how high I had the gain turned up on my amp to get a normal output (around 90% on the knob), I think I need another gain stage before the amp no matter what. I'm going to turn down the distillers' onboard gain a bit and try an external boost. Failing all that, I guess I'll have to try wiring it up as stock and run a single filter further down the chain.