Hi Let me introduce myself my name is andrew and i live near durham city in England. OK heres my question: I currently play an Alembic epic four string and a rick turner 5 string fretless. recently i have heard that it is a good idea to use an external preamp with piezo electrics, which my rick turner has and also with a low impendence setup which i beleive my alembic has. So should i get an external preamp instead of just going into a bass head? can anyone recommend a few good ones to try out? thanks very much in advance andrew
Hi, Andrew. I don't consider myself an expert on these things, but I can tell you what I like personally. For DI/Preamps, I think that the Sadowsky outboard pre is one of the best ones out there. For rack mount preamps, I like the Alembic F2-B and the BBE BMAX-T(which I beleive is a souped up copy of the F2-B). Good luck with your search.
I'm pretty sure that both of your basses have internal preamps which satisfies the need for a preamp. It is easy enough to verify. If your bass has a battery in it, then it has a preamp internal (assuming that it hasn't been modified from its original construction).
You do not NEED a preamp for the piezo interface with your Renaissance. The reason to use one would be if you wanted more tone control or better signal routing or two channels, one set up for each bass, that you couldn't get on your amp OR if you wanted to use a preamp as a head and then use a separate power amp + speakers or powered speakers. At the risk of being self-promoting, you might check our D-TAR Solstice and Equinox as good external preamps. A Solstice would allow you to preset tone controls for each of your two basses and even use different effects if you used the insert points on each channel.
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