• Ernie Ball
  • MusicMan
  • Sterling by MusicMan

budget bassist

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Jul 25, 2012
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2
So some of you may remember from a few years back (under a different username) I started a project with a Musicman SUB bass, with an OLP neck, Seymour Duncan and Status pickup and passive OLP electronics on the cheap. Well I managed to get hold of a Bongo preamp, but never got around to wiring it up, for one reason or another. Well I've got some time, so I thought I'd get it done, but I could use some help. I was hesitant to post here because of the nature of the project, but you guys are going to be the most knowledgable on the subject that I could think of asking, and (hopefully) most helpful!?

So I've gotten my head around the wiring on the bongo pre, there's the battery inputs labeled BRBR, the TRS outputs with what I assume is a ground that needs to go to the underside of the bridge (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong), and the BPU and NPU inputs marked B and W. Now this is where I'm struggling, I know from past experience that stock MM pickups have two wires, one from each coil, one black and one white, which would make sense there. I'm attempting to wire in a Seymour Duncan Basslines pickup, which has 5 wires coming from it (inc ground). I've had a look at the Seymour Duncan website, which is full of useful things like retrofitting to a Stingray pre (which is totally different), and wiring the pickup in series/parallel, but none of this is really helpful for this application... Can anyone point me in the right direction?!

There's also the status pickup, which only has two outputs, hot and ground, any ideas with that?

Thanks in advance
Sam


P.S. I can take some photos if it's helpful, and of course some photos of the build if anyone is interested :)
 

the unrepentant

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Ok so I managed to remember my old account details

sorry about the quality of the photos, i just took them on my phone
here you can see the bit of PCB with the pickup inputs, on the left is BPU with B and W inputs, and on the right is NPU with B and W inputs

IMG_0209.jpg


And here you cans see the pickup wire for the SD Basslines pickup, 5 wires - red, black, green, white and bare (it needs stripping back a bit, i know that)

IMG_0210.jpg


There's also the Status pickup with a single core and ground, but I didn't take a photo of that. The rest of the pre seems fairly self explanatory.
 

Golem

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`

IIRC, having done some SD's years ago, red & green is
the equivalent of black and white, so you just treat each
pair as a seperate pair of PU leads. If you join hot to hot
and neutrall to neutral, thaz parallel; and H-N-H-N would
be series, same as if you had physically seperate 2-wire
PUs. The ground wire acoarst is a toadally seperate deal,
unrelated to the pairs that handle the signal voltage.


`
 

the unrepentant

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Great, so green and red are hot, and black and white are neutral? Does that mean I can just connect the green and red wires to "B" and "W" on the PCB, ignore the black and white and then obviously connect ground to ground?
 

the unrepentant

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I've just had the pickup apart, and what you say makes sense now, the black and white go to each end of one coil, and red and green to each end of the other. I guess now I just have to mess about with some combination of those to get a sound I like. Thanks for the help.
 

Golem

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Great, so green and red are hot, and black and white are neutral? Does that mean I can just connect the green and red wires to "B" and "W" on the PCB, ignore the black and white and then obviously connect ground to ground?
Best to double check the SD site, bit IIRC:

Red is hot with green neutral [a pair], and
white is hot with black neutral [other pair].


`
 
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