New Pickup, New Pre, All Free, Merry Christmas!

Hooray for Christmas!

My ever-so-supportive family loaded me, my wife, and the kids down with just a crap-ton of musical gear. I got a couple of bits of electronics and a cheap piezo for a pickup. Noticed that it cost less overall (had I been the purchaser) than a "good" pickup without a preamp, and had a little food for thought. I'm such a cheap sob that I always want to know how the value priced gear really sounds.

When I searched before, I didn't get much direct info about my specific pickup, and some people use other versions of the stomp with DB, so I figured, "Why not start a thread on TB about getting this setup installed and sounding not-awful?"

First, the equipment list.

Tildey is a 25 year old Englehart with Silver Slaps. Setup is a little lower than 'billy, but still on the high side. I play mostly country and folk nowadays, with a little slap, but not much. My previous pickup situation was a mic wrapped in foam shoved into the middle of the bridge. It was not ideal to amplify and added a TON of mass to the bridge. I missed a good opportunity with a blues band 'cause I couldn't get enough useful volume before feedback, and the EQ was never, ever right.

New pickup is a $40 Shadow Electronics SH-SB1 Single Disc Transducer for Upright Bass. Feature list includes a tone/volume preamp. There is no pre-amp and neither volume nor tone controls. It does make noise when I screw around with it and I suspect there's some kind of way to make bass noises too, so it shouldn't be too bad.

Electronic gizmo is a Zoom B1on, which is like $50, but has all the programming (but none of the interface) of their more expensive current generation multi's MS60B and B3. I never played with a multi like this before, and it's really kinda fun to make all those funny noises some out of a speaker. About 90% of all the pedals and amps and sims and phasers and flangers and whatchamagigs will be absolutely useless on a DB. But, that other 10% is (hopefully) exactly what the doctor will be ordering whenever I get this together.

Amp is a Crate BX160 115 combo from the 80's. There's a parametric bit, gain shaping, a 7 band graphic, and a couple hi/lo boosters. Seems like a dumb choice for DB, but there's a TON of shaping built right in. It also has the advantage of being located close to home.

First thing to do is to get some samples of current noises for apples-to-apples later. Recording setup is also rigged up with an old laptop, a mAudio USB Producer mic, Audacity, and the shove-it-in-the-bridge pickup. Works much better for recording than in the rehearsal room.

Maybe I'll find out something worth writing down for future cheap-pickup searchers.

 

Shadow Pickup

Installation Instructions (whose bridge is shaped like that?) that don't work

Zoom B1on Product Page

 

I've been wondering how I should mount this exactly? The bridge wing is way too open for the recommended way.

It's my recollection that a piezo is gonna pickup vibrations regardless of where it's mounted. I worry about the finish if I use that blue tacky stuff on the body and about staining if I use it on the bridge. I seem to recall having a piezo that clipped to the center of bridge near the strings using a spring clip once upon a time.

Wedging it in place with foam seems to help, although I can't really see it being a long term solution.

 

Hmm, how does that electrical mismatch pertain to sound changes? On my first pass, it seems like I can make some sounds, but until I nail the pickup placement, I won't be able to tell if it'll be any problem. It makes a thin, tinny noise when direct to the amp without compensation. Should have more experimentation up today, but there's no way I'm changing any components to fix a problem I didn't know about

 

Okay, just got back from an Audition (I got the part for being solid rather than good but whatever), and will screw around this evening.

Foam: There was some included in the package but it's really soft, a piece of my high density mute and a piece of my low density one. Don't really want to sacrifice much of my mutes though
Cork: Don't have a real one, but I do have a fake
Reed: Sax player gave me one to use
Wood: I have a composite shim and a little piece of balsa that might be too thin at 1 ply and too thick at 2 ply so might not be worth the trouble.

I might skip the recordings and just do impressions - my wife is getting annoyed.

 

Mutes, BTW, are from my BG.

Foam: High density is a bad choice, it's the wrong size, shape, and color. It doesn't quite get the right height at 2x and I can't get 3x through the hole. It's also bright blue, which will look absolutely awful. Packaging Foam is a low-ish density foam backed with a sort of car-headliner fabric. The proportions are all wrong and the foam isn't dense enough to hold tightly, even though I had trouble physically getting it through the hole. The foam from my regular BG mute was OK, but volume was notably low and there was some buzzing when amped to compensate.

Balsa, as expected, was the wrong thickness entirely. Also, the tenor sax reed was too thin. I don't know where to get a bari one without buying it, so that was also a no-go. The shim kept falling out, so I threw it on the floor, and it broke in half. Still didn't fit. I had a felt pick of the wrong thickness, but nothing else felt-y.

Cork (or rather artificial-polymer-that-takes-the-place-of-cork-in-mass-produced-wine) turned out to be the best fit. Thank you @eub_player!

My first cut was too big, and the second was too small. The third was, of course, just right to push the disk firmly without bending. Turns out that the disk was exactly the same size as the cork and it looks much, much better with the blonde cork-y thing.

Wow, the volume difference is startling. The tone is much fuller with the cork than it was with any of the other choices, and it really sounds pretty good when eq'd through the amp. I got a couple minutes to play with the pedal too. I didn't get a chance to tune anything, but a wokka-wokka-wokka sound as reinforcement to my bass made me laugh out loud.

I'll hopefully get some pictures and another track or two recorded tomorrow - the missus has to work

 

Okay, you'll have to forgive me 'cause I only had an hour to do these samples, but here are direct pickup and a chop of some effects on the B1on.

This will take some pretty serious tweaking, but it's gonna sound outstanding at the end!!!

 

Overall impressions:

Shadow SH-SB1 is a cheap piezo pickup that might sound like crap out of the box.
Zoom B1on is really a cool gizmo, but there aren't any stock sounds for this situation, so you'll have to roll your own.
Audacity is REALLY limiting and mAudio Producer USB is a POS mic.
I need to buy some better gear immediately.

Now, to go work on the BG!

 

Agreed. When I have more time and less ear fatigue, I'll really dial in something that I like, but I'm booked AM and PM for the first part of next week, which is good for the ego and wallet, but bad for sitting down to play the same lick a jillion times.

 

2 rehearsals in and everything is working like a dream. I've gotten compliments on tone from both groups as compared to the crappy pickup method from before. I have a jam session with a bunch of guys that are a hundred times better than me on Sunday, so we'll see how that goes.

That cheapie Shadow Pickup / Zoom B1on combo blows me away for less than $100!!!