J.B. Player Precision Bass Rescue and Setup, Take One

Well, lookie here!  I go from working on small stuff to working on big stuff. 

This is a J.B. Player bass I've had for a few years.  I'm not using it (plus I want to build one), so I decided to clean it up and donate it to Hungry for Music.   The bass used to belong to a friend and colleague who passed away at a tragically young age.  I think he'd be down with my giving it to someone in need. 

The bass is pretty much a generic Fender Precision copy, except it has a Jazz Bass-style pickup on it in addition to the P-Bass pickup.  The hardware on it is pretty decent.  I'm going to clean it up some, do some rewiring, put new strings on it and set it up.

The old strings are shot.  Plus there's some goofiness going on with the way they were put on - the bass has slotted tuners, but the strings were wrapped around the posts the way you'd wind them with unslotted tuners.

We'll fix that minor issue.

I'm guessing the bass has a basswood body.  The neck seems to be maple, and it has a dark Mystery Wood fretboard.

It's been a while since I handled a bass and I've forgotten about the scale of things.  The tuners are huge and of course the scale length is long (34").  

It's pretty dirty, but should be easily cleaned up.  It works fine and plays ok, but it just needs some attention.

One of the main issues is the wiring.  A P-Bass just has one pickup, a volume and a tone knob.  A Jazz Bass has 2 pickups, with a volume for each and a master tone. 

So this wiring is a little wonky to me.  Clearly one of the switches is stock - it looks like the one closest to the volume control, but the other one was added for some reason. 

The front switch seems to turn the front pickup on or off; the back pickup seems to be on all the time.  The back switch is broken.

My guess is someone 'modded' the bass before my friend got it.  I don't think he was up on a lot of mods and junk.  I'm just going to rewire it so it has one (new) switch that will give the player a choice of the front pickup, the rear pickup, or both together.

The wiring is kinda messy and there's masking tape covering some of the connections. 

Next thing to do is rewire it and make sure it works.