Vintage p-bass tone enhancer

[basmicke]

I'm looking for ideas of how to, in a simple way, raise the output level and maybe add a touch of compression to my old p-bass. It's the single coil pickup, and it's original, so I'd really like to keep the signal chain as clean as possible, not altering the original sound if possible.
Any suggestions within a poor musicians budget is really appreciated.
Maybe the compression idea is not good but it would be nice in some way to be able to even out the peaks that are pretty common on these old single coil pickups. The solution might be to lower the pickups even more but at the same time that takes away some of the nice bark and dirt in the sound and makes it too mellow in a way.

[Bootzilla]

Try a booster (ehx lpb-1, catalinbread super chili picoso, exotic rc booster, fulltone fatboost etc.)

[Derek Kiernan]

Raise the pickup and control the spiky resonance with the tone control. The capacitor doesn't come into play until about 4 or so, so anything above will primarily be dampening the peak.

[lolaviola]

MXR micro-amp.

[walterw]

signal chain compression is exactly what you're looking for; it will even out the spiky nature of that pickup and keep or even gain a little level.

boosters and micro-amps won't do it, unless they blast the next thing in line into compression (which won't sound good for bass).

whether that compression is from a dedicated pedal, a tube preamp or whatever, that's the direction you need to look in.

[basmicke]

Originally Posted by walterw

signal chain compression is exactly what you're looking for; it will even out the spiky nature of that pickup and keep or even gain a little level.

boosters and micro-amps won't do it, unless they blast the next thing in line into compression (which won't sound good for bass).

whether that compression is from a dedicated pedal, a tube preamp or whatever, that's the direction you need to look in.

I was thinking to try a T-Rex Squeezer. That way I can adjust the overall gain and control the amount of tube/compression effect.

[walterw]

haven't tried the t-rex comp, but the carl martin unit is a really good hi-fi compressor that lets you visually set your threshold and ratio, so you can see when and how hard the compression kicks in.