Old 442 Bass - Doner Designs Content

Doner Designs · Sep 10, 2016

I have since sold this bass, but still have lots of pictures. Making a thread by request from a TB'er in another thread. Thread is mostly about the J, but it got modded over the years in tandem with a P bass, so I'll include a few pics of the P and the "Bass of the Week" link below which covers both basses in an earlier incarnation.

Bass of the Week: Steve Doner’s Frankenbass Twins | eBass

Doner Designs · Sep 10, 2016

Subsequent to the photo above, the J started life as a Vintage Modified Squier Jazz bass. The P started as a $40 Squier I bought on a Craigslist deal.

I don't have a "before" picture of the Jazz, but here's one of the Precision along with an "after".

Next posts will focus on the Jazz.

Mosstone · Sep 10, 2016

Great transformations!!

Now let's see how long it takes for someone to shame you for putting Fender decals on Squiers.

Doner Designs · Sep 10, 2016

Ok, here's a series of photos on the Jazz and a little history, all of which happened over a couple of years.

As noted above the J began life as a new VMJ Squier. First thing to go was the bridge and then the tuners. After that, I did series/parallel/phase switching on the stock pickups. After that I added the mudbucker. Mudbucker was on a 3 way toggle with the neck/middle J pickup.

Next as I recall was to swap the pickups for Dimarzio Area J's. The stock pickups were excellent but I wanted noiseless. Later I added a second bridge pickup and switched out the mudbucker for a Dimarzio Willpower.

I think the last thing was to put in an Audere four band pro-z preamp. Actually after that I put an Allparts neck on it because the trussrod popped through the fingerboard on the original neck.

The nickname Old 442 ties in with a car theme on my old basses (Mustang, Stingray, etc). In the bass context 442 stands for four band preamp, four pickups, two coils per pickup.

The nuke switch is a link to something we have done on most of our charity theme projects. I replaced it with a second jack before selling the bass.

Sold this one and all my other production basses to fund some other builds.