Bass circuits

[MrBaens]

Ok so elephant in the room, I know this isn’t an offset specific question but my question is mostly about 50s wiring and treble bleed on a single coil system and other forums aren’t so open or knowledgeable about weird mods… and you guys are awesome.

So… jazz bass wiring. I was a bass player before I got my jaguar and am now looking to add some tonal options. The first and easiest is to add a switch to wire the pickups in parallel. Easiest way would be a push pull pot… but I’m a modder now so easy won’t cut it. So I thought of swapping out the tone control pot for a two way switch and then both volumes for stacked pots, to give two volume two tone.

Now short circuit electrics does a loom called the desecration, which does basically the above but with an additional pickup selector and… kinman treble bleed… I started pricing up my own with 50s wiring instead of the treble bleed but the issue is that since 50s wiring just connects to the outputs of the two volumes without a switch to isolate the two parallel circuits (the bass almost always uses some combination of the two) having two tone controls just won’t work. Without the treble bleed from the 50s wiring though it’ll just get muddy sounding (a regular jazz bass is effectively a two volume one tone 50s wiring setup).

So I’m at a loss. Do I need to get a whole bunch of resistors and mini caps for a kinman treble bleed just to get a two tone two volume setup for a system that basically always has both pickups active.

[MrBaens]

I should also point out that 50s wiring should work nicer for the series mode in my understanding, and since that was the proximal motivation for the mod, i thought that might be a good way to go about things.

[electric__ralph]

How about a rotary switch instead of a toggle? That can give you the options you’re after.

[bodhi]

Well, strictly speaking the treble bleed is completely optional. Basses of olden times didn't have any, to my knowledge not a lot of basses ship with treble bleeds these days anyways.

I'm not sure I'm following the problem with 50's wiring, since we're talking about where in the circuit the tone pot is connected it should not to my understanding (I haven't tested this) make using this in a two pickup setup impossible. However, there is not complete isolation of the controls in series, which might be what you're alluding to?

The Kinman treble bleeds doesn't affect this either, really, but allows wiring the tone pot to the volume input, ie. less interaction between the volume and tone pots while keeping more treble in the signal as the volume pot is turned down...

[MrBaens]

Ah missed all these great responses! 50s wiring the tone cap is added to the output. If both pickups are active both outputs are connected therefore both tones are connected to both pickups. In a two volume one tone scenario you connect the outputs of both volumes and connect a tone cap to that. Essentially 50s wiring. Early 60s jazz basses had 2vol 2tone and people found them too dead sounding, the traditional jazz bass 2V1T setup in the mid 60s solved this by granting a little treble bleed by attaching the tone cap on the output.

So this is pretty much my question for those that have played with 2volume 2tone settings where you want a (just a little) bit of treble bleed and both pickups active at once.