The Warwick Fortress Jazzman/$$ Project!!!

B

Bassman

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I recently bought a used Rockbass Fortress to use as a parts donor to keep my '94 Fortress One 5 string going. So now I have a Rockbass Fortress 5 string with no pickups and no electrics. What to do with it?

I looked in my parts bin and in there I had a Seymour Duncan Basslines Music Man style Humbucker with exposed pole pieces, a Seymour Duncan Basslines J style single coil with exposed polepieces and a couple of MEC Dynamic Correction J style single coil pickups. Hmmm... a smile started to creep slowly over my face... a Fortress Jazzman or maybe even a $$ if I buy another pickup... Whoo Hoo! This is going to be good I thought.... Turns out the string spacing on the Basslines single coil was way out so that didn't work out but hey... still a good idea right?

Ok - going ahead with this in January and I'll post pics at various stages. Step 1 is to get the humbucker pickup route done for the bridge postion and try it for a while with the Jazzman configuration probably using one of my MEC passive single coils to start with. I'll drop in an EMG BTS circuit and have a series/parrallel/single switching option on the humbucker.

After that I may go the $$ route... just for the hell of it!
 
Cool.
I'm lookin' forward to seeing and hearing this beast.
 
If the string spacing's too narrow for the pickup, remember that the Jazzman has a slanted neck pickup for that very reason!
 
thefitz said:
If the string spacing's too narrow for the pickup, remember that the Jazzman has a slanted neck pickup for that very reason!
Click to expand...

That's right... the Basslines pickup I tried had a 70mm string spacing whereas the MEC equivalent has a 67mm spacing and slanted to sit correctly with the 64mm neck string width on the bass. Looks like there is no standard pickup on the market (with exposed polepieces) that will fit the 64mm string spacing so either I stick with a closed bar magnet type or I have something custom made or I go the $$

I spoke to a couple of custom pickup makers I know and they both quoted around £100 for a custom pickup.

What would be perfect (if I could find one) is the neck pickup used on the discontinued Rockbass Streamer Blackhawk although there was never many 5 string versions around. As well as being designed for a straight (rather than slanted) neck position, it also has large polepieces which match the MusicMan style humbuckers visually. Warwick are not even selling replacements of this any more so if anyone has one lying around or knows of a blackhawk for sale at a cheap price let me know!
 
Just looked into the Blackhawk - cool stuff! I love that neck pickup location.
 
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