Help my dub out my Stingray

H

Henry D

Supporting Member
Sep 11, 2006
657
13
4,616
London, England
#1
I have an HS Stingray, and I’m looking to refine its sound a little.

It has the stock electronics with the 3-band preamp, and I’m currently experimenting to find the perfect flatwound strings for it.

With the bridge pickup soloed, it does a pretty decent Bernard Edwards/Chic impression. With the neck/bridge pickup blend (and heavy use of the onboard EQ), I can get a massive low-end sound for reggae/dub.

The problem I’m having is that—even with the most extreme EQ settings (max bass, mids cut completely, treble cut completely)—I still get some of that zingy top-end sneaking through.

I tried adjusting the pickup heights—lowering the bridge pickup and raising the neck pickup—and that solved the problem for the blended sound. However, the soloed bridge pickup lost its punch.

As far as I can tell, I have a few options:

  1. Wiring a passive circuit to the bridge pickup – to pad it down or roll off some top-end. Essentially, I’m trying to replicate the sound I had when there was a big difference in pickup height.
    Does anyone know what kind of capacitor or circuit could work in this way?
  2. Getting a different preamp – Are there any preamps that will preserve the general Stingray vibe, allow me to cut the mids and highs, and eliminate the constant zinginess I get from the stock 3-band?
  3. Getting a custom pickup set made – perhaps with an overwound neck pickup. This is probably the most expensive option, but it could be a possibility!
 
#3
That
MartinB said:
Is it a spike around 4kHz that you're hearing? There's some information about what causes that from 11:02 onwards:
Click to expand...

That's the one! Thank you.

I'm hearing that resonant peak no matter where I set the EQ.

I do like the 3-band tonal response in general — I just wish I could dial down that 4k slightly when I wanted to!

Is there a way to dull down the pickups outside of the preamp? (Maybe a passive tone control?)

The peak doesn't bother me on the neck pickup soloed, for example. I guess it doesn't have much 4k for the preamp to accentuate in the first place.

Or is there another Stingray-flavoured circuit that can cut as well as boost? Most of the ones I've come across try to replicate the 2-band circuit completely.
 
#5
That accursed 3-band preamp is the sole reason I hardly ever play my HS neck-thru. At one time I was going to swap the preamp or convert the instrument to passive, but I pulled the control cover and found a rat's nest of wires I simply don't want to deal with. So my point of this post is, pull the cover off your SR and decide for yourself whether you really want to tackle the project, or you have better things to do with your time.

On the rare occasions I play my SR, here are the settings I use:
* Switch in the "4" position, i.e. 2 coils like a Jazz bass.
* Bass: Just a tiny bit up from the full CCW position, just enough to hear a trace of bass boost. No more than that.
* Mid: 10-15% up from full CCW.
* Treble: Full CCW.

Signal level will be extremely low so you'll have to make up the gain somewhere downstream. Some preamps (separate or amp front ends) will have enough gain to get by, though.
 
#6
I often use a Low Pass Filter pedal to remove all the top end past a certain frequency. Some multiFX contain one too.
Just make sure they can go under 300 Hz. I had one that went down to 145 Hz. That was a bit of an extreme setting, and needed a bit of a boost, but opening it just a bit you started getting some really good tones. I sounded better than I am ;)
 
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