Hey all, so I’ve only been playing bass for like 8 months (just finished Josh’s course) and now have a bass problem… well I have multiple bass problems, the biggest problem is I now own multiple basses, and decided to upgrade one of them.
Long story details:
I recently bought a Fender players series Pbass and decided to upgrade the pickups, pots and bridge. I added a set of Darkmoon Hellhounds & wiring harness, which only have a single ground, but I noticed as I took out the stock pickups there was also ground to the bridge which was not on the new pickups and pots. As a newbie, not sure if that was important. I grounded the one wire that came from the wiring harness.
Short story details:
I am getting a lot of buzz (and not the happy kind) when I crank the tone knob clockwise, it disappears if I turn it counter clockwise. If I also touch the instrument cable the buzz ceases. Knowing F all about electronics, I am assuming that I also need to ground the input plug, but just want to confirm.
You definitely need to ground the bridge. The good news is it doesn’t matter which ground connection you run it to (as they are all on a common ground), so you can solder the bridge ground wire right to the jack ground if you want. Basically, all of the grounds should share a common electrical connection.
The output jack is what supplies the ground to everything from whatever you are plugging the instrument in to. You need to ground everything else to it.
I actually wired one recently like this, the only difference being I ran the bridge ground to the jack as well, instead of to the volume pot. Note that sentence “diagram assumes pots are grounded together” - that’s important but not shown in the diagram. All that matters is that everything shown as grounded is on the same ground circuit. Here’s instructions:
This is not the only way to wire a P-bass. But no matter how you do wire it, three things are true:
You must ground the bridge
The ground circuit must run to the ground post on the output jack
Everything grounded must be electrically connected to the same ground circuit
I just got around to fixing my issues, big thanks to @Howard and @Wombat-metal. I know a heck of a lot more now about grounding & soldering than I did before and the Pbass sounds awesome thanks to the replies.
