Double Bass Need a new pickup- full circle or…?

[Endlesssolo]

A slight tangent about the output of the Yamahiko. I personally found this pickup almost un-usable with the stock output jack, due to high enough output to distort my Clarus and my WW, with or without the fishman preamp I have. I tried soldering a capacitor in a spare 1/4” cable, and that fixed the problem. There are a few threads about this on this forum, lots of good info. Once I found the right cap value (for me, 2.2) I ordered an output jack (he calls it the output cable) from yamahiko and now I can use any 1/4” cable.

A couple of auto-correct mistakes in my post that I can’t seem to edit, so I put them in bold here. Annoying!

 

[Eric Hochberg]

The FC is a very nice and easy to use pickup. It will generally work without a preamp into many bass amps with over 1M Ohm input impedance.
A full range sound compared to your Realist. The Yamahiko is the original version and some like it better for a little more money.

I was involved in a live recording situation this past weekend and I gave the soundman a line from my FC and a line from my Schertler Stat B.
He went with the Stat B, so there's that to consider (I don't know the details). The Stat is a nice non-piezo pickup requiring a preamp with phantom power and it can be a bit more finicky in installation and placement than the FC. tt can easily be removed if necessary.

 

[turf3]

My experience, which I believe others have reported as well, is that the two little circular piezo elements of the Realist eventually sink into the soft spruce top of the bass and it loses output. I tried to shim under them but it didn't really work well. This is a major flaw, in my opinion. I went with the Full Circle to replace it, since all the guts are located in the adjusting wheel.

I had to do some modifications to my bridge as the adjusters originally on there did not have the same dimensions as the Full Circle. Just matching the thread size doesn't guarantee that the FC will fit your bridge without adjustment. One thing is that the diameter of the unthreaded part of the adjuster is not standard.

 

[PB+J]

On my old Shen bass, which was a big 7/8 size, I really like the Ehrlund pickup. My new bass came with a Full Circle, which I recorded a few licks through and thought sounded pretty good, not as good as the Ehrlund. I took it the Fishman off because I'm not going to be needed an amp any time soon and if I do I can stick the Ehrlund back on easily.

For what it's worth the Ehrlund sounds noticeably better with the Ehrlund preamp, probably an impedance matching thing

 

[Ric Vice]

On my old Shen bass, which was a big 7/8 size, I really like the Ehrlund pickup. My new bass came with a Full Circle, which I recorded a few licks through and thought sounded pretty good, not as good as the Ehrlund. I took it the Fishman off because I'm not going to be needed an amp any time soon and if I do I can stick the Ehrlund back on easily.

For what it's worth the Ehrlund sounds noticeably better with the Ehrlund preamp, probably an impedance matching thing

Actually, the newer RedEye Twin or RedEye preamps from FireEye Development really make the Ehrlund EAP come alive. They are a vast improvement over the Ehrlund Preamp. Just my take of course and yes it is an impedance buffering device.