Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

My Rick was "growling" today! I realized the neck pu was off and when I played right on top of the bridge pu, and dug in, I got a really cool growl out of it. Of course, it would "fart" when I tried to dig in even deeper, but that growl was to die for! Too bad it was in church where I couldn't explore all of the sonic possibilities! It didn't sound much different playing normal as far as tone, it just growled when I dug in!

Farting in church is never a good idea .

Unless you do it and then immediately stare at a nun like she did it!

I did this in the 5th grade and got in BIG trouble!

plugging into the wrong ric-o-sound jack essentially makes your 4003 a 4000 ... a one pickup bass ... these days I usually roll off the neck volume a little to get some growl ... but when I play in church I play the 4004CI5 ... it growls ... I slap, pop, whack, and get all up and down the neck ... they weren't used to seeing that in church ... but most of my playing is in bars where I can go all out ...

Man who fart in church sit in own pew.

I resemble that remark!

Bill: Don't you mean "own P.U.?"

Aren't you never supposed to plug into the Rick-o-sound input by itself? I thought I remember reading that it could cause damage.

The Rick-O-Sound jack is simply a stereo jack, wired so each pickup, with its associated volume and tone control, goes to a separate output. The mono jack has a switch built in that shorts the two outputs together when you insert a plug into the mono jack, thus making the bass mono.

To use the R-O-S out, you simply need a stereo (tip-ring-sleve) jack, with the tip going to the treble pickup, and the sleve going to the neck pickup... which is why plugging in a mono phone jack (tip-sleve) gives you just the treble pickup.

Now, you may be wondering why does it sound different then just selecting the treble pickup with the switch? Because when you are using the mono jack, you have all four potentiometers in the circuit, and that amounts to four 250 K resistors in parallel with the output. This causes a certain amount of loading, and you loose a bit of top end and volume in the process. If you turn one of your volume controls down a bit, you get even more loading.

To clearly illustrate this effect, try rewiring the bass so that the pickup goes directly to the output jack, with no volume and tone controls. You will be quite surprised at the difference!

This is one of the benefits of active buffers, such as in active tone controls, etc. But the trade off is you need room for a battery in the bass. Replacing the volume controls with 500K (or 1M) pots might improve the situation somewhat. I had a small FET preamp in my 4001, that really cleared up the sound. The bass was tighter and the highs were higher.

You can't damage anything on a passive instrument simply by plugging in your cord to your amp. What Ric says is to only use one or the other, since plugging into both will prevent the circuit from working correctly.