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King Koa - Now With Nordy's!

#301
I hear you on the helpful store comment. The folks I was talking to about the pickups pointed me in the Delano direction. After their recommendation, I decided to e-mail the builder to see what his take was on the situation and I found out the the sales folks had already called him to discuss my bass; I was more than impressed.

Now please keep in mind, if I'm ever looking Roscoe's way (or at any of the products you carry), I'll certainly be giving you a call. You do a fantastic job of photographing and recording the equipment that makes me wish you were located up here in New Hampshire.

Matt
 
#302
GMSweet said:
Now please keep in mind, if I'm ever looking Roscoe's way (or at any of the products you carry), I'll certainly be giving you a call. You do a fantastic job of photographing and recording the equipment that makes me wish you were located up here in New Hampshire.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much, Matt!

My sister used to live in Portsmouth (what a fun town!). And both my folks are from Maine, so I used to get up to New England pretty regularly. Hardly at all anymore, though... :(
 
#304
CrashClint said:
Greg, you need to quit experimenting on King Koa and give it to me. :D I will have to rename that bass, Franken Koa! It's ALIVE MmmmmWwwwwaaaaaaaahhhhhh
Click to expand...

Yeah..... Right..... I see that happening.... :rollno::D:D:D

I've decided to be a little more patient and systematic about comparing these differents pickup & preamp experiments. I'm going to thoroughly record each setup the same way so I can literally hear the differences after fact.

With that in mind, here's me playing one of my loop sort of clips where I build up a loop like I would if I were using my loop station. I want to add some noodling on top, but I just have't done that yet. For now, you can really hear how King Koa souds as of this moment (with Nordstrand NJ5FS pickups and an Audere 3ZB 4-band preamp).

"King Koa (Nordy/Audere)"

The main riff is mostly bridge pickup, the "kick drum" is all neck with treble rolled off a bit and low mids boosted a bit, the "snare drum" is both pickups & flat EQ, and the bass line is all neck pickup and flat EQ.

It sounds really good to my ears, especially through the Berg NV610. I'm just hoping to compress it all a little bit and get some more ooomph/booty down low. That sounds like a prescription for the Bart NTMB to me, but I'm going to give the Mike Pope pre a shot first since it's already bought and paid for...
 
#306
I think of the tone of it as "airy". There's meat down there, but it doesn't kick you in the chest. I started playing around with the MXR compressor, and all of a sudden it was sounding more like I want it to sound. I'm hoping there's a combiantion of pickups & preamp out there that just gets me to the tone I want to hear without any pedals involved...
 
#307
So I got the Bart NTMB pre installed today. Holy balls, this thing kicks a whole lot more down low, even flat. The Audere was very clean and very flexible, but it was a tad too polite for my tastes. I'm loving the Bart with just a couple minor quibbles that I think I can fix:

1) I bought the active/passive version, which I guess may force the use of a linear taper volume pot? (I don't know why that would be... it's push-pull, but you should be able to find an audio taper push-pull ). Anyway, I need to switch out the volume pot for an audio taper. Right now I can't make small adjustments to my volume, it's pretty much all or nothing. I'll happily lose the passive mode if I must, I can't imagine I'd ever use that.

2) The version I bought also has a three way switch for the mid frequency. It comes stock with three choices: 250Hz, 500Hz and 800Hz. You can futz with the capacitor values on the switch to change those frequencies to whatever you like, and I'm pretty sure I'll have some fun trying some other values that I may find more useful.

Just experimenting a little today, it seems to me that the 250Hz and 500Hz are nice for boosting when playing finger style. The 800Hz is kinda honky when you boost it, but it is nice to cut it when you slap. Boost the bass and treble & cut the mids @ 800Hz, and you've got a pretty bodacious slap tone.

All in all, I think I really dig it. I'll be able to say for sure once I get the volume pot worked out...
 
#308
Cool Greg! For overall versatility it's hard to beat a Bart 3-Band pre.
I'm sure that it will differ a bit with different wood combo's (and your p/u's) but I'm sure that Bartolini played around quite a bit before he settled on the 3 std. mid center points. Personally the 2 that comes standard on the Roscoe 3-band is perfect for my ears.

I'm still ordering a Demeter pre to have on hand just in case I get the itch again (and I know that I will)! :)
 
#310
I think I've discovered my volume pot problem. The active/passive push-pull pot is a 250K value, but the active circuit calls for a 25K volume pot. I'm not sure if the push or the pull part of the pot is 25K and the other is 250K, but I kinda doubt it. I guess you have to use a 250K pot for passive operation, so the active operation sufffers as a result. Boooooooo!

Screw passive. I put in a 25K volume pot, and life is now good as far as a useable volume control goes.

250Hz is a touch muddy to my ears, so I may try raising that to 300Hz or so. Right now I've got a buzz gremlin in there somewhere. Take your fingers off the strings, and buzzzzzzzz.... the bridge is grounded, so I'm not sure what's going on. Probably a ground loop, there are way too many ground wires in the cavity at this point...

I'm going to order a nicer 25K pot, and then I'll redo the install when that gets here...
 
#311
Just 'cause I'm a sucker for documenting things like this...

Here's the control cavity before (with the Audere):
AUDERE-PRE-KING-KOA.jpg


Here's the Bart NTMB preamp as it arrived (it's installed on a piece of cardboard):
BART-PRE-KING-KOA.jpg


And here's what the bass looks like now:
3000-NORDY-NTMB.jpg

3000-NORDY-NTMB-BACK.jpg

3000-NORDY-NTMB-BODY.jpg


I was planning to order another set of Koa knobs once I'm settled on a preamp, but I'm actually really digging the black knobs. It's a tougher look for what is now a much tougher sounding bass...

:hyper::hyper::hyper:
 
#313
I don't know if you can see all the bare ground wire in the photo of the Bart pre (the pre itself is out of focus - oops!), but there's bare wiring connecting all the ground terminals on the pots to all of the backs of the pots. Roscoe also does a cool thing with their cavity shielding where they run thin copper foil strips from each of the holes to the other holes, all of which helps ground everything that should be grounded...

Of course, at this point I think it's overkill. One of the grounding techniques is redundant, and I suspect it's leading to some ground loops. I'll probably rip out the Bart bare wires, just 'cause they look like antennas-waiting-to-happen to my EE mind.
 
#315
RocketMusic said:
And here's what the bass looks like now:
3000-NORDY-NTMB.jpg

3000-NORDY-NTMB-BACK.jpg

3000-NORDY-NTMB-BODY.jpg


I was planning to order another set of Koa knobs once I'm settled on a preamp, but I'm actually really digging the black knobs. It's a tougher look for what is now a much tougher sounding bass...

:hyper::hyper::hyper:
Click to expand...

Greg,
Have I mentioned that you have a an awesome looking Roscoe? :)
Yeah, I thought that I had but it's worth saying again! ;)
 
#316
JOME77 said:
Greg,
Have I mentioned that you have a an awesome looking Roscoe? :)
Yeah, I thought that I had but it's worth saying again! ;)
Click to expand...

I would say this too, but, we Don't want Greg's head to get anywhere near the size of mine.

It'd just be disproportionate.......Kinda like this; Link Removed

with arms.

:hiding:

:smug:

:D

God Bless, Ray
 
#317
RocketMusic said:
..... I'll happily lose the passive mode if I must, I can't imagine I'd ever use that.
Click to expand...

Obviously, you've never heard the Nordy pickups in passive mode. ;) Nordy pickups kill active AND passive. That's one of the things I love about Nordy pickups. They sound great even without a preamp. There are A LOT of pickups out there where this is not the case.

That is still one of the nicest Roscoe basses I've seen. It's a killer.

And you just need to put a Nordy preamp in that thing and be done with all this playing around. :)
 
#318
Here's a quick and dirty mix of the start of a new tune that Danny and I are recording. It shows the new and improved solid low end of King Koa now that the Bart NTMB is in there. The bass line is palm muted, so you can't hear really clearly what the new tone is all about, but I hope you can feel how much more massive the low end is now. I'm pretty over the moon with my current electronics setup (Nordy NJ5FS PUPs & Bart NTMB pre)...

"Have Time" (Written by Daniel Dunlap)

That's Danny on keys & his Gretsch Brian Setzer model geetar. I programmed the drums & played a quick bass part using King Koa. Both of my efforts are definitely rough takes, so this tune is going to get a LOT better before we're done with it. :hyper:

Danny's daughter is apparently becoming quite the sax player, so he wants to get her to blow over this a bunch. I can't wait!
 
#320
I just played this with my wife sitting here. She wants to write lyrics to it.

Would you mind, Greg? And, if you don't, can you send me the whole file?
 

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