I realized last week that I have had my current bass for something like six years now.  I bought my NS2000/5 from Mars Music, when there still was a Mars Music, while working there in high school.  It was a huge step up for me.  My first bass was a Dean that cost $130 dollars and was a gift from my parents.  It stayed my only bass for several years until I received a Squire P and J for my birthday.  The Squire was great and I couldn’t afford anything else, so I stuck with it for a while.

Then I got a job at Mars, working as a guitar salesman.  I was surrounded by basses constantly.  Everyday, when it was slow, I would pick up a different bass and start playing it through some rig that was beyond anything I could afford.  Then one day, we started carrying Stuart Spector basses.  I was blown away with the look of the bass as well as the neck through construction which, to me at the time, was synonymous with expensive basses.  The best part was that the price was something attainable by a high schooler working part time at a guitar store.  The discount we got definitely helped, but I still couldn’t afford to buy it outright, so instead I put a red quilted maple topped NS2000/5 in layaway and proceeded to use paycheck after paycheck to pay it off.

I distinctly remember the day it finally became mine.  I was nervous as can be.  The whole time, I hadn’t bothered to tell my parents that I had just purchased a $600 bass guitar.  I brought the bass home and hide it under my bed, trying to think how I could break it to them.  I finally pulled it out and showed it to them and let them know that it was mine, but I was serious about playing bass and therefore needed a serious instrument.  They surprisingly didn’t give me any grief about it and that was that.  

After realizing how long I have had this bass which still serves as my war horse, I knew it was time to make some upgrades.  I have always been wary about changing anything on my bass because it is the only playable one I have at the moment and I can’t afford to not have a bass.  However, I tear into my car all the time and it is worth 10 times as much as my bass and it is about as important, being the only car I have, so I threw caution to the wind and took on a small but important project.

The project was two fold.  First, I was going to upgrade the shielding in the electronics cavity and add shielding to the pickup cavities.  I found a really informative tutorial on TalkBass by Lyle Caldwell about shielding and grounding your bass system.  I ordered the copper tape to line the cavities from Stewart-MacDonald.  I started by removing the strings, then took everything out of the cavity.  This involved pulling out the trusty soldering iron in order to free the pickups from the pots.  

I was disappointed to say the least to see how the pickups were connected.  Instead of having a lead and a ground coming from the pickup, the lead was covered with a shielding cable that was soldered to a pot and then the lead was solder to a terminal on the pot.  This made me change my whole grounding plan and have to wire the system the same as it was before.  After getting the pickups free and removing them from the bass, I started taping.

In Lyle’s tutorial, he was shielding a Jazz bass which looks to be a much easier job than shielding my Spector.  First, my cavity is huge.  It also has a lot of weird angles and corners that made the whole process a little tricky.  Spector also did a terrible job making the cavity.  There was a whole wall that had not been sanded.  The bottom was very rough with little peaks rising from the shielding paint they had put down.  Again, I was less than happy about this.  I pulled out some sandpaper to smooth out the wall and worked on the floor of the cavity as well as both floors of the pickups which had the same small peaks.

I then applied tape to the floor, working it in however I could.  After that I started working on the walls.  I made sure to smooth the tape as well as I could.  Finally I covered the entire lip with tape which would meet with the cavity cover to complete the shield.  After finishing the cavity, I worked on the two pickups including the tunnels from each pickup to the cavity.  After several hours of work, I was finally done with the shielding process.  

For my first time attempting anything with the bass, I was pretty happy with my work.  The next time I do this, I will probably put some more work into prepping the cavities and also try and use less tape.  It was much easier with this bass to do small areas at a time than to try and use one long sheet of tape.

The final part of the project was changing the system over to an 18 volt circuit.  I soldered in another battery snap in series to boost the power of the system.  I then connected everything again and installed the pots and pickups, completing the job.

I was able to try it out last Wednesday and I didn’t really notice a huge difference but that was my expectation.  The project was more to gain experience working on the bass and getting comfortable with how everything is wired.  I actually had a problem with wanting to ground out so something might be loose in there.  I have to open it up and see what is going on.  I know the shield is grounded properly because I checked it with a voltameter.  

Regardless, it was fun to work on the bass.  My next project will be replacing the tuners on the bass because the D tuner lost its bushing.  I still need to figure out what tuners I want to go with, and find money to do it, so that isn’t a priority at this point.

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