This post will tell the tale of my bass and its journey to becoming gig-ready, but first I must share with you something that gives me great joy. Today marks the first of many "school" days that I will not be spending in class. Yes! North Park University just started up today and I am proud to say that, as opposed to sitting in class, I have spent the entire day doing literally whatever I want. Being graduated is pretty much fantastic! But yea, now on to bass stuff.
The weekend of the 17-18 marked the first "real" bass gig I've had! Ryan got me in at the Compass church, and the main challenge leading up to the gig was making my Squier Vintage 70's Jazz bass sound good. Basically, I needed a preamp and a thorough setup - the stock setup was terrible, and the bass sounded extremely weak with its original passive pickups. So, I bought a Bartolini preamp...
...and the preamp turned out to be a pain because the electronics cavity in my J-Bass was small - I needed to use a router to create the necessary room for all those parts in the picture above! Unfortunately, I don't have a router, buying one was the same price as having it installed, and it needed to be ready ASAP, so I took it to a shop and they put it in for me (and did a great job!). Next on the purchasing list = router.
Once the preamp was in, the bass sounded better but still played like CRAP, so I had to do a setup. Of course I waited until Friday night to do it (the gig was the next day). Needless to say, I definitely had the motivation to do it right and get it done quick! Thanks to some excellent tools I got from Stewart MacDonald, I was able to do the job in about 2 hours. So what did the bass actually need to have done? First up was a fret-level...
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| I had to first remove the strings, level the neck with the truss rod and a straightedge, then color the frets with a sharpie. When that was done I used that wood handle file shown above to level the frets. Basically, when the marks are worn away on all frets they are level. This job was tricky though because the last 6 frets seemed to be high, so after leveling everything I took those last six down even further than the rest. Making sure no fret is too high or too low is essential to having a low action, and ideal playability! |
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| After the frets were leveled, I had to reshape the tops and give them a nice rounded profile. I used that handy file shown above and it made quick work of the process of re-rounding the leveled frets. |
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| After rounding the fret tops, the hard work is done for fret leveling! The last task was sanding and polishing the frets with sandpaper and steel wool. And so, the fret level part of the setup was done! |
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| Nearing the end of the setup, I just had to lower the string heights at the nut (shown in the above and below pictures). Doing this on all strings with a file that matches the width of the string does wonders for playability! |
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| The next steps are the easiest for sure. I adjusted the truss rod to where I wanted, then set the string height, double checked everything, and set the intonation last. |
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| And voila! We have a gig ready bass! Overall, this thing cost me less than $600 and it sounds great! I had a great time playing it at Compass Church. If you read this and want to know more about setups/guitar work, hit me up and we can do a lesson or something. Or I can just fix your instrument for you! |
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