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Seymour-Duncan pickup booster

brock29609

brock29609

4 strings, 2 wheels
May 11, 2003
538
31
Greenville, SC
#1
Anyone tried one of these on bass? All the reviews out there are from guitar players. How clean and how subtle of a boost can you get with one of these on bass?

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SFX-01 Pickup Booster Pedal
The first effects pedal designed specifically to work together with the pickups in your instrument to achieve optimum gain and resonance for all your tonal applications. Turn the knob to dial in pure, flat-EQ gain, ranging from 6dB, all the way to an astonishing 25dB!
In addition, the Pickup Booster can add thickness to a single coil pickup. By engaging the Resonance Switch, the resonant peak of a single coil pickup can be lowered, making a Strat® pickup sound similar to a vintage humbucker or even a high-output humbucker.
 
#2
brock29609 said:
Anyone tried one of these on bass? All the reviews out there are from guitar players. How clean and how subtle of a boost can you get with one of these on bass?
Click to expand...
The intended use for this pedal is more for guitars with low-output "vintage-type" single-coil pickups to help them get more overdrive from tube amplifiers.

If your looking for a clean boost for solos or whatever, I would suggest an EQ pedal like the Boss GEB-7.
 
#4
I've got one and am quite happy with it... it does exactly what it claims to do, which is simply boost your signal. I use it for soloes, and find that setting the boost level to 6 dB or so gets the job done just fine. So... I recommend it, it's fairly reasonably priced also.

I've experimented with the difference Resonance settings and haven't found any significant difference in tone, but this is with my preamp-equipped basses, so it's not surprising that this guitar-centric feature doesn't make that much a difference in my own situation. But with a passive instrument the results may be different.

Greg
 
#5
It's a boost pedal and there's many pedals around that do similar tricks for different prices (from cheap to expensive):

• MXR Micro Amp
• Boss GE(B)-7 EQ (the level slider)
• Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster
• Fulltone Fat Boost
• Robert Keely Java Boost (don't know if it's that good for bass though, but it has a full-range mode that should do the trick).
• ... ?
 
#8
Phyrexian said:
I don't see the point in all this truebypass ****... (I'm not trying to offend anyone...)
Click to expand...
No offense taken.

The point is that without true bypass, your tone will almost certainly change to some degree. In boss pedals, your analogue signal gets converted to digital and then back out to analogue again. Other pedals, like the EHX MicroSynth, have very audible tone suckage when supposedly off. There are other non true-bypass pedals which don't suck tone, such as the Dredgetone Angler.

Are all my pedals true bypass? No. I have a mutron which is most definitely not true bypass. But those that aren't I keep in an effects loop on my loooper.
 
#9
Very true David. Very true.

I, like most bassists, don't like pedals that suck out low-end out of the signal. I had a DOD Bass Overdrive and a ProCo Rat that both did that; I got rid of them for that reason.
Anyway, in my band situation I don't hear much signal loss with cheaper pedals (TU-2 for example). But I can understand the idea and its importantancy (?) for people who use many effects in their chain...
I have a Fulltone Bassdrive that's supposed to be true-bypass; I can say that the pedal hasn't influence on my signal... lucky enough because that pedal wasn't cheap at all :)
 
#10
I've managed to put together a collection of pedals that are all true bypass except for one (the wah). I have a Loooper pedal which allows me to bypass all effects, but I see no difference in my clean tone when I A/B my effects loop.

USA Bassballs
Fulltone Bass Drive
105Q Wah (not true bypass)
Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster (coming in the mail)
 
#11
The Micro Amp is not true bypass, but no noticable loss of tone on mine, but when you turn it on...WOW. Very impressive booster for very little money. I've read some bad reviews of the S D booster, I think the negatives were reliability, check the effects review section of harmony central.
 
#14
This might be the ultimate zombie thread! For me, anyway.. It was last posted to in Feb. 2004, right after I joined TB..

I have one of the original red Boosters. I lost the case screws a while back and hadn't played it. Dennis Russell, in Seymour Duncan support, was kind enough to send me not 4, but 8 replacement screws free of charge. Thanks, Dennis!

Late this morning, I put a fresh Duracell 9V in and plugged a Douglas violin bass into the Booster, then into my Genz-Benz Shuttle 9.2-12T combo. I then spent the next two hours playing through various settings of the Booster and the combo 9.2 head. Too much fun! I never knew how many variations of overdrive and sustain were possible with that combo. Some of the more extreme combinations of boost on the pedal and gain on the input of the head sounded raucuous and unmusical, but many other lesser settings, with various EQ configurations, were sheer delight. I was also able to hear a difference in tone with the three resonance settings

In his email to me, Dennis Russell said, "Those old Pickup Boosters are great!" I definitely agree. I am still learning about gain staging and overdrive after all these years, and the Pickup Booster is going to be a definite tool on my pedalboard going forward. Wowee!

Anybody else here on TB using one these days?
 

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