Double Bass MXR10 band EQ pedal

[badgrandad]

I knew when I bought a piezo only upright electric that it could sound a little “quacky” especially when being bowed so when I started playing my Ibanez UB 805 I wasn’t too concerned about tone because you could roll off the tone knob and get rid of it, but it was a little too dark sounding for my tastes, so I ordered the MXR 10 band eq pedal and could right away with just a little fiddling around get rid of a lot of the quack without darkening the whole sound.

Look forward to seeing how it sounds through the Church PA system.

Plus I can undo some of the overkill the sound engineers tend to put on the subwoofer frequencies!

 

[bass player 53]

There’s a 10 band equalizer made for bass, but it’s a little pricey. Sometimes, they show up used on-line.

 

[Wasnex]

I have a MXR KFK 10 band. AFAIK it's pretty much the same pedal as the M108S. It's a decent EQ IMHO. Input impedance is only 470K. So not an ideal termination for a piezo pickup. Consider running some sort of buffer in front of it, such as a F-deck HPF which has 10 Meg input impedance.

A more powerful options would be Source Audio EQ2. This can be set up to function as 10 bands of fully parametric EQ. It's a digital pedal, so you may find the interface a bit confusing. Input impedance is 1 Meg. This is considered the minimum load for a piezo pickup.

Another good option would be the Empress Bass ParaEQ. This has pretty powerful tone shaping in an analog package. Input impedance can be set to 10 Meg or 1K.

Good luck!

 

[Slevage]

I knew when I bought a piezo only upright electric that it could sound a little “quacky” especially when being bowed so when I started playing my Ibanez UB 805 I wasn’t too concerned about tone because you could roll off the tone knob and get rid of it, but it was a little too dark sounding for my tastes, so I ordered the MXR 10 band eq pedal and could right away with just a little fiddling around get rid of a lot of the quack without darkening the whole sound.

Look forward to seeing how it sounds through the Church PA system.

Plus I can undo some of the overkill the sound engineers tend to put on the subwoofer frequencies!

I recently purchased a Stanley Clarke 2 channel preamp because I do 2 gigs per year where I double (mostly EUB, sometimes DB). I split a 1-10 Elf combo into 2 chancels and have great FOH support.
I’ve own my Azola over 20 years and the Clarke preamp is the best thing I’ve added to my signal chain. It’s got a HPF, so it would be easy to tame heavy subs.
Fortunately, the FOH engineers run their subs off an aux out, and per the director’s and my request, keep the thunder low in the FOH.

 

[grubdumpling]

The Empress Para EQ Bass mk2 pedal (I think I got that right, it's the lavender one...) is in a higher price category, but does a whole lot and has switchable input impedance, kind of designed for this sort of thing and everything else, fantastic pedal and a lovely colour...

Bass ParaEq

empresseffects.com

 

[badgrandad]

As a newb forgive my ignorance but what does the higher impedance level do for the sound of the piezo?
I am assuming since the Ibanez has some sort of active circuit in it it must have some type of buffer as well.

 

[Wasnex]

As a newb forgive my ignorance but what does the higher impedance level do for the sound of the piezo?
I am assuming since the Ibanez has some sort of active circuit in it it must have some type of buffer as well.

A piezo pickup is highly capacitive and basically interacts with the input impedance to form a high pass filter (HPF). If the load impedance is too low, the cutoff of the resulting HPF is too high.

If the bass has an active preamp, it provides the required buffer for the pickup.

 

[bass player 53]

As a newb forgive my ignorance but what does the higher impedance level do for the sound of the piezo?
I am assuming since the Ibanez has some sort of active circuit in it it must have some type of buffer as well.

I’ll leave it to others to explain more fully.
The input impedance of the mxr is what they will talk about.