Recently I had problems with signal clipping and distorted sound from my Laney Bass amp, and after tinkering around, I found this was caused by a drained 9V battery used for the 2 band equalizer in my Ibanez bass. Now, the funny thing is, the circuitry for the equalizer is so that it connects the battery and the preamp pcb and the output jack, without any switch or sensor in between. Which means, the preamp circuit is active at all times, thus draining the battery all the time. Result - 15 days, your 9V battery gets drained off even if you don't play the thing even once. Pretty dumb I thought, coming from Ibanez. Least they could have done is put in a sensor at the jack (like effect pedals) which would sense when the guitar is plugged in and switch the preamp circuit on. Anyway, at the risk of invalidating Ibanez warranty, I have adopted a simple mod to the circuit. I connected a simple on/off switch between the battery and the preamp, and cut a small hole in the plastic cover at the back and fixed the switch there. Its a small rugged switch, and does not interfere with playing at all. This will solve all my battery related problems. Also, my bass has no sound output without the battery, so now I have an on/off switch for the guitar as well, I can turn the guitar off from the switch at the back. I will try to click a pic and put it up. Next project of mine would be an indicator, LED or otherwise, which will tell me about the 9V battery condition. I hope this will be of help to other bassists who might come across similar problems.
