mounting a pickup (or contact mic) in the headstock

[kayosiii]

I recently had to do quite a bit of traveling on a bus (many hours) and took my bass along with me to practice - Because of the cramped confines I ended up playing the bass upright with my ear against the top of the neck to hear what I was doing. What I noticed was that this particular bass sounds really good in this fasion and has a lot of sound that is getting lost through a conventional pickup. This got me thinking about how I could redo the electrics to get a much better sound out of the bass. Acting on this last weekend I went to the local Violin shop and mounted a stick on Double bass pickup (can't remember the brand but they are swiss made) - designed to pickup the vibration of the wood rather than the strings and placed it on different parts of the body to see what sounds I could get out of it... It turns out that the sound closest to what I wanted was when the device was fitted to the headstock.

Which brings me to the problem - If I mount something on the headstock I somehow need to get wiring hooked up while impeding the ability to play the instrument and effecting the sound as little as possible. Does anybody here attempted something of a similar nature - how did it work? what did you learn from doing it the way you did?

[cricketfever32]

you can probably use an undersaddle pickup for an acoustic guitar under the nut, but i've never tried anything remotely close to this, i'd love to see where you go with this idea

[T-Bird]

Hi.

Haven't tried quite like that, but there's two ways that I can think of to get the signal from that piezo.

#1 Tie Your strap to the headstock, like some acoustic guitar players do and attach the cable to the strap.

#2 Use the strings as conductors. You'll usually have to insulate only one string with a bone or plastic saddle and a plastic bushing to the mounting hole (if not strings through body). If You have a grounded bridge without any capacitors, that's your ground. Obviously the nut has to be non-conductive as well.

On the option #2 You might pick up unwanted interference because of the unshielded "cables", but perhaps it's worth a try.

Regards
Sam

[kayosiii]

That might be a cheaper option than what I am currently looking at - essentially i want to pick up sound from the body rather than the strings - but I will try this if I get a chance - the tricky bit is of course that Either I end up with wires hanging from the top of the bass - which would end up being quite clumsy to use- or I need to route cable down the neck of the bass somehow.

[kayosiii]

Thanks TBird - those are really simple solid suggestions.

I will try attaching a strap to the neck and see how I like it... Balance wise. The second option intrigues me somewhat - the bass in question does not have a metal nut or bridge - that also means that the strings are not grounded also the pickup I was looking at uses a balanced output - but might be a possibility if I choose a different device to get the neck sound.

[erikbojerik]

I forget where I saw this, but I recall seeing a project from a guy who built his neck from scratch and mounted a film-type piezo underneath the headstock lam, and ran a tiny wire down a channel underneath the fretboard. It was a bolt-on, so he had to thread the wire into a similar channel in the body starting at the neck pocket and ending in the control cavity.

[ppk]

there is only one problem i see in doing that because when you are tapping the other half of the string is still vibrating when you strike a fret so you would get some weird overtones. im not sure if that would be an issue with regular playing (plucking, slapping, ect...). I was thinking about doin somethin like that. like someone said above, you can make a channel that goes under the fretboard to put the wire in and have a hot setup. I hope somone like you builds one of these i am interested to see what happens



Paul

[abarson]

For a bolt-on, you can put a piezo in the neck pocket, which should give you that neck sound. I got this idea from the DeMars Long Trail bass that was reviewed by Bass Player some time back, and I'm going to try it on my fretless build.
http://www.demarsguitars.com/instruments/bass.html