Many guitarists and bass players end up with quite a collection of instruments. Chasing that one sound you love hearing on your favorite recording is a common culprit. But I couldn’t really justify to myself owning a large collection of basses. So instead, I put as many sounds as I could into one bass.

The main components of how an electric guitar or bass sounds are the strings, the pickups, and the scale length (length of the strings from bridge to nut). To a much, much, smaller extent the weight of the instrument plays a part. By adding pickups to an instrument, it can often be like adding a whole second instrument to your arsenal. In the case of this bass, I wanted to get the sound of a Gibson EB-0, a Fender Mustang bass, and a Rickenbacker 4003. The first two are more or less perfectly recreated tonally in this instrument, which the Rickenbacker bridge pickup is just an approximation.

The bass I found for this project is a short scale 30" P-bass made by SX. SX is a good brand with quality necks. I recommend this brand to most people looking for cheap quality instruments. You can buy them from rondomusic.com. I got this one used on craigslist. I chose a short scale bass because it produces a “thumpier” tone with more fundamental and less overtones. The original Gibson EB-0 is a 30", the Fender Mustang bass is also 30", and the Rickenbacker has a 33 1/4" scale. A standard bass scale length is 34". The Fender mustang is very popular these days with indie bands for this tone.

First thing I did was eyeball some stripes with painter’s tape and sand everything down for primer.

Pretty basic stuff. The important thing is to not let anything get completely dry so the painter’s tape will come off smoothly. After this, I applied Rustoleum 2x painter’s touch 2 in 1 orange and some clear coat. I’ve also finished a guitar in matte, and it looks like but I wanted this one to look more professional and be more durable. The next step was to route spaces for the pickups.

I used two different strategies to route out the pickup cavities. For the “mudbucker” in the neck position, I simply traced the area I needed and routed it out freehand. This is because any rough edges would be covered by the pickguard. But for the stratocaster size pickup, the routing wouldn’t be covered up, so I first painstakingly created a template from medium density fiberboard(MDF). This was done using small files and a lot of elbow grease. I would periodically check to see how close I was to the pickup being able to fit through the template. Realistically, this is a huge waste of time, as there’s no real need for a perfect fit. But the instrument looks a little nicer and I can afford to be a perfectionist with my own instruments. With the template made using a straight bit with the router adjusted to the correct depth made this a breeze. To make the route deeper, you can remove the template with the existing cavity acting as the new guide.

Now not much needed to be done, just wiring. I wanted to have a switch for each pickup. In this bass, all the pickups are humbuckers. The stratocaster size pickup was a dual steel blade mini humbucker with a ceramic magnet. I wired each pickup to a 3 position 2 pole mini-toggle to allow for series-off-parallel switching. Basically, each pickup could either have one coil running into the next coil (standard humbucker series wiring), or each coil running in parallel. This gave me an optional quieter and less bassy clearer tone for each pickup. I’ve noticed that the tonal difference between these options hasn’t been much, but there’s a big difference in volume.

The bass sounds great. It really nails those classic sounds, even the rickenbacker sound a bit, though I might try swapping the pickup for something else. I positioned the pickup as close to where the 36th fret would be, to emulate the original rickenbacker bass, but I’m not getting a very ceramic sounding tone from it. I’m not sure why, but a stronger output pickup might help.