If you have to pull the pick guard from your instrument, you are likely facing some kind of malfunction, as I did recently. This is a standard, entry level Fender P-Bass. I’ve had it for at least five years, and it’s been a reliable instrument. So I was really surprised when I picked it up to record a bass part for a recent song and there was something wrong. The signal was so weak that if I turned the amplifier all the way up, I could barely hear it.
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But of course, this still leaves me with a broken bass. So out comes the multimeter, soldering iron, and tools. I am very lucky to have been formally schooled in electrical engineering. After a few minutes, I have determined that one of the two pickups in the pair has an open circuit. The two pickups, when tested in series, should produce a resistance of something like 10 kΩ to 12 kΩ. Because they are in series, the values of each pickup should add up to the total. The first coil measures 5.5 kΩ. That’s just what I expected, as both pickups would then add up to 11 kΩ. However, the second one measures 35 MΩ. Bingo. That’s a huge, huge resistance. For the record, that makes the overall pickup resistance 35,005,500 Ohms, although it’s not super relevant now that we know the thing is hosed, because that is three orders of magnitude higher than it should be.
Here’s the thing. This pickup, well, all pickups, actually, has super fine wires—filaments—wrapped around the magnets a zillion times. If the connection between the filament and the rest of the harness is broken, it is possible to fix that. Tricky, because everything is so tiny, but possible. But if I can’t see the break, or if the break is in the windings on the coil, then this is out of the realm of something I am capable or desirous of doing. I can’t see the break, of course.
The problem is that this bass part has a deadline, you know? I needed to write, comp, and mix the bass part in a few days. I solved that problem by borrowing a bass from my son. It’s super handy to have musicians in the family. Although, side note, he lent me his Ibanez bass, which has active electronics and a bazillion possible tone settings. As I was leaving his place with the bass, he said, are you sure you don’t want the rechargeable batteries? I scoffed. No, I got this. Hint: I should have taken them because the first battery I used ran out of power when I was setting levels. After that, though, things went well. This was the bass part for “Christmas (I Hope),” which you can listen to here as soon as I get my legal ducks in a row.
These are the pickups in question. Can you even see the filament running from the white harness wire to the pickup coils? That is what I’m dealing with.
So off I go pickup shopping. After not buying some really sexy new $250 Fender Cobalt bass pickups, I settle on a more modest upgrade of vintage-sounding Fender P-Bass pickups for about $150. The stock pickups in this bass are not easy to find, but probably run around $80 to $100 retail. This is a powerful reminder that most of the cost of an electric guitar, at least the lower end ones, seems to be mostly in the hardware.
So the moral of the story is… it’s always good to have redundancy. This is something I learned in my career as a reliability engineer. I don’t actually own a second bass. Of course, if I bought one, it wouldn’t be another P-Bass. Not because of this incident—things happen. But because I’d want the flexibility of a different style of instrument. So even if I had a backup, it wouldn’t have the same tone, but at least it wouldn’t halt music production.
Also, in case you are wondering, I wrote the “V” on the potentiometer because I know myself, and I’d get it confused with the tone potentiometer if I didn’t label them.