Double Bass Mic & Pickup Mixer Pedal

[Jeremias Paul]

Hi Everyone!
I have a Noble Pre-amp and want to use it with my upright bass via a piezo pickup AND a microphone. Can anyone recommend a pedal that can blend the piezo with a XLR mic input? Thank you!

 

[Ric Vice]

You already have one of the finest preamps available. I’m not sure a microphone will add that much to your sound. It’s going to cost you a fair amount of money to
add the microphone to your setup. The Headway EDB-2 H.E. will work nicely but it costs @ $340.00.

 

[DoubleMIDI]

A small mixer behind the Noble gets all of the Noble and you have a mic input there too. For your application (piezo and mic) and already having a good piezo preamp that might make more sense and it’s cheaper.
A second preamp might only make sense if you want to use it as a backup. But even then I would place it behind the Noble unless you think it sounds better that the Noble (related to input impedance). A valve at the input might sound a bit nicer than a J-FET.

 

[bassically_eli]

The Headway isn't technically a pedal. I'm not sure how important that is to OP, but the only pedals I can think of with two channels and an XLR mic input are the Stanley Clark Acoustic Preamp, the Zoom A3 (now discontinued but not hard to find used), and the Grace Designs Felix.

 

[Wasnex]

You could consider something like a Behringer Flow 8. As @DoubleMIDI suggested, run the pickup into your preamp and run the mic into the Flow 8.

The Flow 8 is a really small digital mixer.

To get the most out of it I think you need to use a phone app.

The advantage is digital typically has way more processing power than a comparable analog board. However I have not actually used or even thoroughly researched the Flow 8 so do your due diligence.

I do have experience running a rack mixer as the foundation for my bass rig. I used to run an Ashley MX508. This mixer did not have instrument level inputs so I run Shure A95U line matching transformers and plugged straight into the mic inputs. I switched between bass guitar, electric upright, and acoustic upright with a pick. The MX508 gave my level matching, EQ, and muting for each instrument. I typically ran one side of QSC USA 900 power amp into an Eden D210XLT. Our audio tech tech a line out of the MX508, rather than running a DI for each of three basses. This surprised me, but it worked well for us.

 

[day82]

EAE StompMix 4 Compact Digital Mixer Pedal - Acoustic Amplifier - Digital Mixer - Elite Acoustics - EAE

 

[Martin Spure]

That EAE Stompmix seems like a very handy option. If it also had semi-para EQ on the Low and High EQ filters I’d be all over it .

That said, there’s also the Vintage Revolution Acoustic Box II :

https://www.vintage-revolution.com/acousticbox2

 

[Phil Rowan]

The Headway isn't technically a pedal. I'm not sure how important that is to OP, but the only pedals I can think of with two channels and an XLR mic input are the Stanley Clark Acoustic Preamp, the Zoom A3 (now discontinued but not hard to find used), and the Grace Designs Felix.

@bassically_eli (apologies if this is at all off topic), or anyone else that's used both, do you have any insight as to how the Headway EDB-2 H.E. compares to the Zoom A3? I may consider one or the other if my humble EDB-1 I've had forever doesn't cut for blending a recently acquired Audix ADX20i clip on condenser and the Realist copper pickup I have installed. Just kind of curious as to what exactly makes the EDB-2 H.E. worth another $200 and change compared to the price of a used Zoom A3. I'm guessing part of it is that the EDB-2 H.E. has a full array of tone controls for each channel.

 

[Happy Steve]

@Phil Rowan , as an ex-user of EDB-1 and Zoom A3, one difference that stands out to me is accessibility of the controls. The Headway has a lot of small knobs which are at your fingertips, maybe a little hard to work out which is which on a dark stage. The A3, beyond the 'bass, middle and treble' knobs has a menu system which has a bit of a learning curve but OTH has a back light. I would'nt know if the parametric eq effect in the A3 can recreate the HE effect in the Headway to any degree.
I did enjoy being able to power the A3 via USB from a powerbank battery.
Just some things to consider...HTH
Steve

 

[DoubleMIDI]

AFAIK the H.E. is an enhancer. That means it creates higher harmonics from lower ones. So if nothing is in a certain frequency range, an EQ cannot boost them, but an enhancer would generate frequencies there, even if nothing was there in the original signal.

 

[bherman]

Take a look at the RedEye Twin - I believe the B channel can handle a microphone. Not cheap but a great piece of gear. I use mine to toggle between upright and electric bass at different input levels, and also has a boost.