P/J bass wiring help needed

I am building my first Fender Jazz bass with a P neck pickup and a J bridge pickup. What is the best way to wire this? 2 volumes and 1 tone or 2 volumes 1 tone with 3 way switch? 2 volumes 2 tones? What do you guys prefer?

thanks,
Keith R

Hi Keith,

It belongs to you ...
Are you a sound freak who loves every nuance? Then 2 Vol. would be best.
Or do you love it short and simple? Then the switch would be best.

I have a 4-way rotary on my PJ (with Master Vol. and Tone).
But I would prefer a 4-way lever switch (like on many Telecasters).

The biggest problem for a PJ bass is the strong neck P and the weak bridge J ...
You have to put the J pickup as close to the strings as you can to get a good balance.
You can put in a trim-pot to lower the p signal. Solder the "right contact" to ground, the "left contact" to "hot-PU" and and ause the middle concat like you would use the Hot-PU wire (go to the Volume pot from the middle of the trim pot) ...

If you love "wiry" sound and don't want to loose hight in sound, solder a 220pF to 1nF capacitor between the two hot (left and middle). The trim pot should have 500k or 1M.

My 300 page wiring collection is in German, but you may get some suggestions? The trim pot (but here for an MM bridge PU) is on page 245 ...
http://161589.homepagemodules.de/t29f2-Cadfaels-kleine-Schaltplan-Sammlung-fuer-passive-E-Baesse.html
It takes some time to download because it's abut 4.5 MB ...

Andreas

I don't remember how I did it, but I rewired my jazz bass so that one knob is master vol. one knob is master tone, and he third know is a pan from front to back on the pickups. I think all bass should come this way.

I settled on V/V/T for mine. I do find there's less output from the J, I've ended up using the P almost exclusively and just occasionally adding a touch of J. I'd take it out if it wouldn't leave a gaping hole in my bass!

Hi Mike,

you should the wiring 2.1.02 (page 194 at the moment) ...

This has a Master Volume plus Master Tone.
The bridge PU can be added by the middle Volume pot ...

If you always have your P pickup on and just add the J pickup, you can set the master volume, master tone and add the J (but never louder than the P pickup) ...

Went with 2 volumes and 1 tone... I can blend the neck and bridge or shut off one or the other..seems to work pretty good.

VVT tried and true.

V/V/T is usually horrible. Go switched or blended or something (anything!) but passive V/V/T.

Just saw this today:

Why, in technical terms, does this common and traditional passive circuit work so horribly? The intent is to be able to smoothly mix the volume levels of the two pickups. The actual result is that you can't -- and instead produce shelf-like attenuation and weird artifacts that sound like an envelope filter:

Here (http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=std_p_j_bass) or here (http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/schematics.php?schematic=std_jazz_bass).

The short answer is that you are mixing dissimilar pickups in a common circuit and they don't like it, but what is the engineering rundown?

Many thanks for a good answer!

I can offer another short answer with a shade more technical detail but I'm afraid my ee qualification is extremely rusty. The filtering/attenuation effect is caused by the pickups loading each other differently at different volume pots levels and different frequencies.

Ideally you would want the pickups to appear to the volume circuit as a pure signal source, ie. it doesn't care what you attach to it, it will always present the same signal. In reality as you move the volume pots this interacts with the real characteristics of the pickup, (effectively one of these ideal sources combined with resistance and inductance). The non ideal characteristics of the pickups cause them to transfer portions of the signal to each other instead of the output.

The frequency dependant part is caused by the inductance of the pickup, ie. the load isn't purely resistive and therefore varies with frequency.

I struggled with this passive pickup mixing problem recently trying to get a circuit to work nicely with two dissimilar HBs in a guitar. I failed to find a really good solution. In the supposedly classic combination of Seymour Duncan jazz + JB, middle switch position sounds the same as neck only until I turn down the neck volume. This is the effect of dissimilar pickups, turning down the volume of the neck pup balances the loading effect of one pick up on the other allowing more of the bridge pup signal to appear at the ouput.

Hope this makes some sense.