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Pedal that can make passive bass sound active?

#42
Rip Van Dan said:
Sure, any of the DI boxes with built in preamp will do that. I play DNA and Eden gear and I have an Eden WTDI, which has a built-in Eden pre-amp along with an adjustable compressor. Got it because I was required to use a backline Peavey 112 combo in a small brew pub and just couldn't get a sound I liked out of it. And we hosted an open-mic night there 3 to 5 nights a month so I really needed to do something.

So bought this WTDI for $149, plugged it into the effects return of that backline Peavey amp and lo and behold, that Peavey sounded like an Eden amp - clear, clean, full and articulate. Plugging that WTDI into the effects return bypassed the Peavey preamp and just used the Peavey power section with the built-in Eden preamp.

I've made lots of amps sound like Eden amps with it and it cost all of $149. Since then I've used it on Peavey, GK, Ampeg, Mark Bass, acoustic, and at least one or two others. The mid control toggles between 500Hz and 2KHz. I run it flat with just a little boost at 500Hz with my passive Jazz and it sounds great. I've also used it to plug into the FOH at a few places and at a recording session in Seattle a couple of months back.

View attachment 3599398

You can also plug it into the input of your amp (use the "active" input or push in the pad button), but then you have to fight the preamp of the host amp on top of whatever you dial in with the WTDI.
Click to expand...

This is probably the best solution for the color that the OP is looking for. Affordable too ...
 
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#47
i'd do a little research on the sterling ray34's preamp ... as in , what are the freqs for the tone control ..?

hopefully most pres should be transparent ,... but they're usually not ... some have a baked in sound ...

i have a few gadgets i use on my passive basses for extra tonal control ; Ashdown OriginAL pre/di pedal , Dr Scientist ' the cleaness ' boost/eq pedal , MXR M108S 10 band eq pedal ( F/S in classifieds )
 
#48
I didn't have a pic of just the pedal alone - but this pedal sounds fantastic (IMO);
IMG-4585.jpg
 
#53
MXR-M80 does a lot of nice stuff for the buck. DI, EQ, Boost, Dirt. I seems to work best with passive basses. I have a bass now that will flip active/passive, but I will use passive with the pedal sometimes because it gives something unique/different from the active sound of the bass.
 
#54
An active bass and a passive bass have one key difference - the passive bass is loaded by the capacitance of the cable between the pickups and the electronics (true whether there are pedals or not). A bass and it electronics (no matter where they are) are a system. One of the ways of optimizing that system is to make the bass active - buffer the pickups from the capacitive load. Another way of doing that is to lower the impedance of the pickups (parallel wiring does this) - in pro audio (what I do for a day job) most audio interfaces are done this way - stick as much cable as you want on most pro audio devices, they still work fine, because they're low impedance - the cable doesn't load things significantly. That makes the cable capacitance far less of a load, and allows you to load the pickups with whatever load you want, rather than being stuck with a load you can't do anything about. You can change the loading by changing capacitors, not changing pickups, which means the experiment costs 50 cents, not a hundred dollars, and....you know which way things are going to go - it's engineering, not a crapshoot of parts changing and hoping for the best

I have passive basses wired this way (actually all of mine are wired this way). With a switch on the bass, I can go from a "passive sound" (one where I've put a capacitive load that gives an amount of loading equal to that normally provided by a cable) to an "active" sound - one with extended high frequency bandwidth, as you'd get in an active bass. It all works very well, and it doesn't require batteries. In the 1950's, with vacuum tubes having the impedance they did back then, it made perfect sense to wind pickups for guitars and basses they way they were done back then. Today, it no longer makes sense, but we're unfortunately stuck in that rut.
 
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#55
Can anybody tell me what a "Hi-Fi" sound is please? I've seen that phrase used an awful lot in relation to basses but no-one seems to agree what it means. Given that the origin of the term HiFi is "high fidelity" i.e. true to the original how can a bass be HiFi? What's it true to, apart from itself? To me, a Stingray has a unique voice for sure (although you can dial most any tone into it) but HiFi? Am I just a pedantic old fart or is this a sloppy description?
 
#56
Robscott said:
Can anybody tell me what a "Hi-Fi" sound is please? I've seen that phrase used an awful lot in relation to basses but no-one seems to agree what it means. Given that the origin of the term HiFi is "high fidelity" i.e. true to the original how can a bass be HiFi? What's it true to, apart from itself? To me, a Stingray has a unique voice for sure (although you can dial most any tone into it) but HiFi? Am I just a pedantic old fart or is this a sloppy description?
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From the TB wiki:

1) High Fidelty - clear, refined, controlled, recorded-like quality with no noise

2) historically - having redeeming qualties such as Full range frequency response yet tends to be relatively flat, boring, and colorless as in the comparison of recorded versus live

(Reflective artist: Marcus Miller)

HiFi | TalkBass.com
 
#59
Hardbassjunkie said:
Is there such a thing? I played about with a sterling ray34 and I enjoyed the hifi sound. It was different then any bass I had. So instead of buying a $1000 CAD bass, is there a pedal that can give me an active sound?
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Master Effects makes 2 and 3-band Stingray preamps in pedal format. As others have said, you won't recreate the exact tone 100% with just the preamp, but it might be worth checking out if you like that MM sound. And they're local to you in Canada.
 
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#60
Hardbassjunkie said:
Is there such a thing? I played about with a sterling ray34 and I enjoyed the hifi sound. It was different then any bass I had. So instead of buying a $1000 CAD bass, is there a pedal that can give me an active sound?
Click to expand...

I used to use an Orban 672A when I played a Ric 4001, and it was pretty amazing the range of tones I could dial in.

The thing is, an EQ can only emphasize frequencies that are in your signal to begin with. So you can't get 100% there with this approach. The reason is because moving the pickup changes the relationship of the pole pieces to nodes and anti-nodes in the string's vibration pattern. You can apply cut and boost to simulate the nodes and anti-nodes, but if you need a simulate a node at a frequency where your bass's pickups are in an anti-node, your out of luck.

Although not fully parametric because the bandwidth is not continuously variable, you might enjoy tweaking your tones with an Empress ParaEQ.
 
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