Arrow Bass guitar!

Minor Bass guitar upgrades that make lots of difference!


This is an affordable bass guitar made by "Arrow Guitars". This is probably not a certain brand but another alias name of a major Chinese OEM factory which produces "Stagg", "Jack & Danny" and other affordable instruments.

Here are its original specs:
Solid basswood body, finished in glossy black,
Maple neck with maple fingerboard and rosewood skunk stripe in the back, finished in satin clear
20 medium frets, plastic nut, heavy duty string tree
classic fender style bass Bridge and heavy duty elephant-ear Tuners
1 x P-bass white split pickup (ceramic rated at ~11kOhms)
1 x volume and 1 x tone control, 1 x output jack
quality 3-ply white pickguard


This bass was purchased back in 2008 for a bit of studio use. It was mostly sitting on its stand at our rehearsal studio and it was a "back-up instrument". At first we thought it was a reliable instrument but a month later, the electronics gave up on us. The solder joints of its crappy pots were terrible and the bass could no longer produce any sound. I fixed that by installing a new set of no-name 100K pots at the time and the bass came back to life. This bass became reliable and played pretty well ever since. The fretwork is excellent and the satin finished neck is so comfortable to play. But what about its tone? Well, at first the tone was bad. There was no treble and the output was just weak. Who's to blame? The strings of course!

 The original heavily coated round-wound strings of this bass were kept on it for like 6 years and did not even get rusty or anything! The problem was that these strings had such a heavy coat of lacquer on them that the P-bass pickup could not produce much output. The 100K pots were also to blame so we decided to revamp this bass once and for all!

I wanted to check each modification and how it affects the tone. First, I got rid of the old plastic 100K pots. I got a new set of 500K Alpha brand pots and a new 22nF tone capacitor. I installed them on the bass and noticed there was no noticeable difference in tone and pickup output. Let me just say that the stock pickup was a really hot ceramic p-bass pickup that I 've used in the past with great results. So, I went on and replaced the stock strings (it was about time, wasn't it?!...). Man! What a difference in tone! The new strings were also coated round-wounds but the output is now much stronger. The tone is way brighter but no bass frequencies were lost. The old strings made the bass sound like the volume was set at 12 o'clock and the tone turned down to zero. The new strings made a huge difference. This is the string set I used for this job:
http://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_bentonvaluestrings_ebass_light.htm?partner_id=73786



I set the bass up for low action and perfect intonation and got it back in the studio to test it out. This is totally new bass guitar! It's more playable and it sounds better than even before. People were saying "change the pickup for a Seymour Duncan" and so on but the solution was to replace 4$ worth of pots and 7$ worth of strings... Putting a really good pickup on it would not make up for the crappy strings and wiring. I wouldn't spent like 60-100$ on a less than 150$ bass guitar anyway.
So, next time your bass sounds muffled, dull or weak, it's time to replace those strings and check its pots and tone capacitor.

Here are a few pictures of this bass:

Cheers, Thanos

guitardreamer.gr@gmail.com