Double Bass Aguilar Tone Hammer for URB?

[Barcza]

Anyone tired or using Aguilar Tone Hammer for acoustic bass? It has 1Mohm input impedance, ( I never felt I need higher with my FC pickup) and it has fully sweepable midrange frequencies from 180 Hz to 1 kHz. That seems usable for URB.

 

[Chris Fitzgerald]

Jeremy Allen uses one through an iAmp doubler, and has posted some info in the huge doubler thread on the subject. I think he likes it quite a bit.

 

[Les Fret]

I have the Tonehammer, I use it for my EB. I haven't used it on my UB because I use my Fishman Platinum for that. Somehow I feel that 10Mohm is better in combination with my Full Circle. But I am not sure if this is true. I haven't tried the Tonehammer on UB so I don't know. Maybe 1Mohm is just as good?

 

[Barcza]

I have the Tonehammer, I use it for my EB. I haven't used it on my UB because I use my Fishman Platinum for that. Somehow I feel that 10Mohm is better in combination with my Full Circle. But I am not sure if this is true. I haven't tried the Tonehammer on UB so I don't know. Maybe 1Mohm is just as good?

It depends on personal taste and particular preamp, but I think input impedance between 1Mohm and 5Mohm way enough for FC, and could be better in several situation than the extremely high 10Mohm.

 

[Les Fret]

In what cases is the 1Mohm better then the 10 Mohm? I never understood much of the Mohm impendance stuff in combination with the preamp.

 

[Barcza]

In what cases is the 1Mohm better then the 10 Mohm? I never understood much of the Mohm impendance stuff in combination with the preamp.

I also don't know, really. I just tired tired number of units which has 10Mohm impedance inputs, and I didn't like one of that units. I know thats mean nothing because, maybe the units was not rightfor me, not the impedance. While many 1 Mohm units works for me.
Fishman recommends 1-10Mohm input, so the the one is enough.Will be very interesting if somebody could make a test record with FC and an adjustable impedance studio preamp.

 

[tornadobass]

The bigger question with the Tone Hammer is if you can get by without a phase reverse and high-pass filter.

The preamp itself would be just one of many "flavors" of sounds that you might or might not like with your pickup, your bass and your amp.

 

[Barcza]

I don't use HPF and Phase Reversing with Piezzo ( never felt needed ). But the adjustable mid Eq, could be useful. Most of the time I don't using additional preamp with the amp, but on tour, could be nice to bring some preamp to dial some tone, if I don't like the local amp. And also could be fine to make my passive bass "active' sometimes.

 

[Greg Clinkingbeard]

I stumbled on this thread when searching to see if anyone else liked this little thing as much as I do. One popped up locally for a great price so I snatched it up, somewhat due to the curious feature of sweepable mids which seemed desirable for DB. Through my DIY 10” it gave me a warm and natural tone with a very solid low end. For comparison, I compared it to an older Clarus and MarkBass Nano 300 and although there wasn’t a clear winner, it sounded a bit warmer. The Clarus is something like 25 years old and always sounded a bit mushy on the low end. The Nano is a very clean sounding amp with nothing added other than maybe a dose of sterility. It’s a tad cold. The Aguilar has just a bit of tubelike warmth to it. I’ll try it against the TC Bam 200 but am sure the Aguilar would deliver more usable power. The sweepable mids proved helpful in getting a great tone on its first gig. The drive knob isn’t something I would use on DB.
For some reason I have never considered Aguilar as legitimate amps for DB but I missed that boat. This will be my gigging amp through the DIY 10 for the foreseeable future.