Soon after the recent shielding job that turned the bass dead quiet, this Japanese made 70's style bass soon became my latest fun new toy and I decided to keep it for a short while.

I love how the heavy chunky Ash body and Maple board sounded, just turn on both pickups, little bass boost, and no treble boost required with a set of fresh stainless steel string (Rotosound RS66LC) ..  OMG ..  I can slap this bass allllll dayy ..    and it instantly killed my GAS for wanting a Coppolo LM5 ..  

oh well ..  it's awesome, the 4 knob contrls are volume / volume / treble boost / bass boost and active/passive switch .    Soon I stated to realized that in order to put this bass to my playing ..   I'll really need a passive tone control    unfortunately, I'm not a bass hero like Marcus, and 99% of my gigs don't require a chunky slap sound ... .    oh well ..   

Anyways, in order to make the bass fitting my need,  I've decided to make a few changes and here are some explainations.

• replacing the hi/lo boost with 1 stacked knob (500k/500k concentric)
• adding a passive tone pot with 500k audio pot with a 0.022uF
• the tone pot is also a push/pull pot and is wired for Series / Parallel pickup wiring
• change the wirings on the active/passive switch to make it True bypass (pickup output and preamp input were connected together in stock wiring)
• of course, shielding with carbon shielding paint

Here's how the wirings looked like under the control plate:

Adding the tone pot definetly make this bass alot more versitile .  However, even with the brighter 500k / 0.022uF pot and cap, I can still hear some sparkle on the high frequency disappeared.   Original wiring had no tone control and it's full on bright .   It's possible to wiring the tone pot to the passive side only, but I decided to keep it on both active/passive as I can compensate the top end by boosting more high.      Changing the wiring on the switch also makes the passive sound true passive .  Feel like I have a great example of 70's jazz bass

Current control is very much like a Sadowsky bass,  PLUS the series / parallel switch !     by default, jazz bass pickups are wired in parallel(pickup signals stacked).   When the switch is engaged, it chains the 2 pickups in Series mode (pickup signals chained, one after the other) to give a louder and fuller tone that imitates a Precision bass !   this mod gives pillow like low and makes the bass beyond capalble of any style ..    Beside putting in the stacked pot and push/pull tone pot with stacked knobs, everything remains stock ..      this bass is actually the first and probably Only Japanese made Fender that I enjoyed this much .

Comparison demo:

Before the mod:

After the mod:

End thoughts:

Adding the tone pot does smooth out the overall tone of the bass .   I still miss that little bright sparkle on the stock wiring and still debating whether I should bypass the tone on the active mode to obtain that .    But other than that , I'm more than happy with everything else .  all the controls are very intuitive, both active and passive mode are more than useable ..    craftmanship on this bass is awesome.   I think this will be a personal bass of mine for the next while ..