Tribute L-2500 Bass pick up rewind | Blogs

Aug 05

Back to main page
Tribute L-2500 Bass pick up rewind

Thu 05 Aug 2010 10:51:45 | 5 comments

Thought I'd a 1/2 hr job checking wiring on a Tribute L-2500 5 sting bass.It was suspected that someone had tampered with it after returning it from an ebay sale.as the coil tap switch wasn't working on the bridge pick up.

The guy i was repairing it for gave me a diagram,but it had completely different wire colours and so I had to trace out the circuit only to find it was wired OK but one of the bridge pick up coils was open circuit.

I removed the pick up covers and found a broken winding and had to hand wind about 100 turns of the thinner than human hair wire, to repair it..

4 hrs later its fixed :)

Nice bass to play but the wiring is like a mass of spaggetti ,you'd think the manufacturers would have cut the wires to a sensible length for each connection rather than cramming them into the space and the circuit board is just floating about wrapped in some rubber foam.

also the pick up windings aren't laquered so serious vibration is likely to cause a failure.

oh well that's today's rant :)

Comments

Jeremy Perron 21 months ago

ah a bit of brain surgery! well done dave.. hey can adding neodymium magnets to the back of my pickups improve the sound any way? i have a few of them in different sizes i could gluegun to the back of the p/ups..

Stevie Smith 21 months ago

I dunno about That J but I know a guy who gaffer taped magnets to his Rickenbacker bass pick-ups to give them a boost...... Didn't work....

davesidley 21 months ago

Well increasing the magnetic flux would definitely the output of a pick up.However placing magnets together is unlikely to do this because they would have to be orientated N N /S S and thus would be trying to repel each other which effectively reduces the flux.If one orientated them N S/N S they would attract and the field would form a loop which would decrease the flux around the strings.

Replacing the magnets with stronger ones would certainly increase the output of a pick up, however the tone of the pick up is determined more by the number of windings which affects both the impedance and the capacitance.
The higher the capacitance the more the top end is rolled off but with more windings the output is higher.

The capacitance and inductance also create a tuned circuit which can enhance certain harmonics
If you can measure the inductance of a coil and the capacitance one can calculate the frequency here
http://www.deephaven.co.uk/lc.html
eg with an inductance of 100 Millihenry and capacitance of 1 Nanofarad the frequency would be about 5kHz which would be about right for a six string if you wanted a fairly bright sound
One can of course add capacitors in parallel with the coil to reduce that frequency which a simple tone control does in effect do but there are many other factors like other load impedances,which affect the end result.

So the rule of thumb is.... many windings = Fat sound high impedance and resonances in audio spectrum.
and ......few windings = Brighter sound low impedance and less resonances .

Experimentation is the only way to examine the end result and this is of course totally subjective.