Re: PJ, QP's and Basslines EQ?
Starting a project in the new year and have this recipe in mind. Have all the parts and more.
Book matched ash body, Mighty Might R/W P neck, QP's, Gotoh vintage style tuners and
funky Gotoh 80's fine tune high mass bridge.
It will do blues, rock and country so a vintage clear finish, tortoise guard and chrome parts set the look.
My main query is going 2 or 3 band EQ as I prefer uncluttered controls but don't want to compromise either.
Personally, if you can fit a 3-band into the project (some body styles have a limited number of holes on a metal control plate), I say go for it. Worst case, you leave the mids flat all the time.
The only other thing I suggest is that you get a preamp that supports a passive mode. Active is great to have in a gigging axe, but if you gig for any reasonable amount of time you'll have experienced the delights of a dead preamp battery with minutes to showtime. For those of us with a quick-change battery box and a spare 9V in our case, this is a 30-second inconvenience, but if you need a screwdriver to get into the battery compartment, or worse, you have a retrofit where the battery's in the main control cavity, this is a nightmare scenario... unless you can just flip a switch or pull a pot and cut out the preamp.
Most aftermarket preamps don't directly support traditional passive controls (the tone control is usually missing), but you can usually hack it. For a two-pickup bass, you'll need two push-pull 250k audio pots for pickup volume (if you want volume/blend controls you'll lose midrange frequency selection unless you can find a push-pull 250k blend/crossover pot; good luck), one stacked 50k pot for bass/treble and one ganged 500k linear pot for midrange and passive tone (on most Fender two-pickup designs, you'll need to drill for a side-mount jack). One volume pot switch will be your passive-active, the other will be your midrange frequency selector (both the Aguilar OBP-3 and Bartolini NMTB support this method of frequency selection; the Aguilar's pretty simple and gives you 400/800Hz selection, the Bart uses user-provided caps to define the midrange center and the default wiring expects a three-position switch, so you may have to play around a bit with cap values to find usable frequency centers).
You'll wire the pickups to the volume pots, then wire the outputs of the volume pots to the passive-active switch. In active mode, the hot lead will go to the preamp and the output lead of that preamp will go to the jack. The midrange pot wiring for the preamp will use the top half of the midrange/tone ganged pot. The preamp expects a 50kohm pot wired as a voltage divider, which you can simulate by jumpering the center and each outer terminal of the pot with a 25kohm and 2.5kohm resistor in series (with the wiper in the center, each half of the pot will have 24.7kohms resistance and the load between the outer lugs will be 49.5kohms, which is close enough; you can get closer by adding 250ohm and 25 ohm resistors to the series stacks but you'll never get to the exact nominal spec). In passive mode, the lead from the volume pots will go directly to the jack, with a pickoff point going to the bottom half of the jack, which is wired like a normal tone pot with a .047uF cap. With the wiper in center position, you'll have a stock Fender-spec bass tone control (250kohms), and you can go brighter or darker from there.
