Double Bass homeade pickup question

[WilliamJames]

Using a homeade pickup for jamming. Two piezo disks wired and soldered to a quarter inch jack. The disks are tightly taped to the top of the bridge. Feeds back like heck and picks up too much background noise unless I roll off my mid and treble amp settings nearly all the way, which of course dulls up my tone. I also lose most slaps and clicks this way.

Seems to work pretty good like this considering but is there a preamp or something I could use that would help.

 

[phatbass]

Do you use a preamp or DI for impedance matching? Piezo's plugged directly into an amp will not give an ideal result due to them having an extremely high impedance (several megohms) in comparison to most amps input impedance.

 

[WilliamJames]

No preamp. I should get one huh?

 

[fdeck]

Well, if you're going DIY, then you could build a preamp too. There is a brief paper on "quick and dirty" preamp designs at my little web page. A number of people have built the basic JFET buffer.

 

[iiipopes]

"fdeck Registered User Maker of HPF-Pre upright bass preamp"

Francis is too modest. Get one of his fdecks and be done with it. I did, and I am very, very glad I did. It saved me much time, effort and money "experimenting," and it's the best thing I ever did after deciding to take up DB.

 

[jloehrke]

gotta say Ive found fdeks pre wonderful sounding but very fragile....I've broken two with very low impact short drops...the kind of thing that happens in gigging situations...I've ordered a fishman

 

[drurb]

The fdeck device is, indeed, wonderful. I've yet to drop it a gig. That sort of thing is not something that is commonplace for me at all so not really an issue.