Double Bass Clevenger

[hwy96music]

You do not hear much about these EUB and was wondering if anyone uses them today. I have a Clevenger Bennet bass that I have owned a long time. I purchased it because it was portable, and the neck and physical aspects were very double bass like and made switching between the two quite easy. It also sounded just like my double bass with a Realist pickup in it. Used it mainly for rehearsals and a little bit for recording.

It has a two pickup system where there is the Clevinger bridge pickup, but also a "holosonic" pickup in the body cavity (hollow body construction) to pick up woody sounds and a knob to blend the two.

From what I understand Martin Clevinger was a pioneer in EUB but others seemed to have eclipsed his instruments lately, but I am not sure why.

 

[Francois Blais]

Use the search function in the forum, there are several threads about Clevinger EUBs.
There's a typo in the thread title, btw.
And welcome onboard!

 

[DoubleMIDI]

I have an old solid body keyhole Clevinger that was converted from a 4-string to a 5-string. The pickups were rather homemade and the electronics passive which is a disaster for piezo sound.

I removed them, sandwiched a cut piezo disk between wood for both legs and put two impedance buffers with one switchable phase, a balance pot and a sum amplifier (basically another impedance buffer) together with a 9V ready-to-use rechargeable battery into the electronics compartment and connected the passive electronics to the output of the sum amplifier. I might have changed the tone capacitor, I can't remember.

Much better sound that way and can be connected to almost any amp.

BTW, even a direct connection from one piezo (bass foot) to output with no passive electronics connected sounded much better than the original. If several piezos are used they better get an impedance buffer for each of them and then the buffered outputs should be mixed. Better sound than pickups connected in parallel.

But my instrument must be very old and modified for the 5th string.