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Double Bass Piezo into recording mixer ok w/o an external preamp?

#3
It also depends on how critical your ear is about sound quality. Before I added an on-board pre-amp, the piezo pickup I use on my DB produced pretty good sound going directly into a studio system but our studio tech really wanted more headroom and more tone control so he plugged his very expensive pre-amp into the chain. It did sound better.

I use Vic's Pickups, they include dual piezos in each individual bridge wing pickup and under most circumstances his single channel pickups do not require a pre-amp. (I use one of his dual channel pickup sets -- Vic's Model C for bridge wing and fingerboard -- and so need a dual channel pre-amp for blending the channels.)
 
#4
Some small mixers now have a Hi Z option on some of the channels, which is usually 1 MegaOhm. If you don't have that, or you have one of the pickups that works best with higher, than a preamp would be a good idea.
 
#5
I've plugged piezo direct, but it usually sounds like crap in the studio. I don't recommend it if you are doing any serious recording, but for demoes its OK. But a preamp should not be required, but might help give you a better sound from a tone shaping and buffering perspective.
 
#7
It is generally best to show up to studios without a pick up on the bass. A mic in front of the bass is your best bet. Bleed is nothing to be afraid of. Don't even offer it, don't let them talk you into it.
IF you have to bring an amp, have them mic the amp and the bass no DIs. Be firm, the risk isn't worth the reward, which is will just be a mediocre sound.
 
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#8
No, the mixer preamp will not work well at all with a piezo. Aside from impedance and gain issues, you need a preamp as physically close to the pickup as possible. If you do this you are going to hurt your sound, a lot, not help it.

Jay Corwin said:
Speaking from experience, this depends A LOT on who is running the board/engineering. If it's someone who doesn't have a good understanding of what frequencies an upright is supposed to be putting out...
Click to expand...

Any engineer worth their salt will simply refuse to participate in this course of action and insist on a proper preamp... and then probably have the pickup at -12 in the mix, anyway.
 
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#9
bassbones2 said:
I want a piezo to use in conjunction with a mic....if I’m just using it in the studio, is the mixer preamp good enough without having an external preamp for the piezo?

thanks

JB
Click to expand...

IMHO try it. I used to run a Realist into an Shure A95U that was plugged into the mic input of an Ashley MX508 rack mixer and it sounded fine.

The A95U is essentially a passive DI without the Through connection, so it does impedance matching and converts unbalance 1/4" to balanced XLR. But the impedance it shows the pickup is determined by the turns ratio of the transformer and the input impedance of the XLR input. I don't think it is anywhere close to 1 Meg. However, I believe the Realist was specifically designed to somewhat overcome the impedance issue to some degree.
 
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#10
damonsmith said:
It is generally best to show up to studios without a pick up on the bass. A mic in front of the bass is your best bet. Bleed is nothing to be afraid of. Don't even offer it, don't let them talk you into it.
IF you have to bring an amp, have them mic the amp and the bass no DIs. Be firm, the risk isn't worth the reward, which is will just be a mediocre sound.
Click to expand...

I second what Damon has to say here. My first experience recording on upright, I brought everything with me. My bass had a pickup installed on it, and the gentlemen running the session was like "oh you have a pickup" and ran it directly into some very nice pre on his board. I stated that I had my own pre....but it wasn't my gig and to be quite frank, I didn't really know what I was doing yet in that environment. So I just went with it. When I heard the initial mix I was kind of horrified, like I play that bad horrified. Every bit of piezo "noise" that you try to cut out with your own preamp was present. I could practically hear my breathing vibrating through the thing. I thought to myself, do I really make that much extra "noise" when I play. Turns out that I don't, but the piezo sure does.

Much later I was told, "yeah it was really hard to get a natural sound of your bass" when the album was being mixed. Live and learn. It was an experience that I gained from. I too remove my pickup before going to record now because of that experience, or rather inexperience on a couple peoples part.
 
#11
On this album, I did a DI out of my Acoustic Image. Not something I wanted to do, but, I wanted to record in a tiny room with two drummers, and I knew the album would be about them anyway. I feel like the sound is OK, and very 1970s.

As @Wasnex said, it can work, and a blend can be nice enough.
The big issue is that the pick up will always be the cleaner signal and a lazy engineer will just use that. They will start talking to you about "bleed" and you will have a fight on your hands. If they only have the bass mic to deal with, they will make it work. I've done probably 60 or 70 studio sessions and even more multi-tracked live sessions - they can ALWAYS get a mic in front of the bass to both work and sound great.

For this album, I was in an iso both, mic on the bass, mic on the amp. I had volume pedal with the amp usually off, and I used the pedal for effect.
 
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#12
After having the dreaded piezo sound end up on a CD (the engineer 'lost' the mic channel), I've taken to telling any engineers that asks to use it that my pickup is 'broken'. Fortunately, it seems like most of the people I record with/for have strong ideas about recording acoustic instruments with good mics.
 
#13
bassbones2 said:
I want a piezo to use in conjunction with a mic....if I’m just using it in the studio, is the mixer preamp good enough without having an external preamp for the piezo?

thanks

JB
Click to expand...


Take #2.
-If you have a good piezo buffer that you normally use, that would probably be far preferable preferable to no buffer. A well equipped studio is likely to have some sort of preamp that will do the job really well, so maybe a phone call is in order.
-My previous comment is merely a suggestion to try it, if you and the studio lack an appropriate buffer. It may or may not work. Results will depend on the characteristics of the pickup, the mixer and other gear in the studio, and the skill of the engineer. Usually engineers prefer to start with a sound source that sounds nice rather than having to beat the sound into shape with EQ or other processing.
-In the majority of studio situations, I would probably expect the upright to be on a mic with no pickup. The bass would either be in an isolation room or surrounded by gobos to minimize bleed from other instruments. A mic tends to give a more natural sound than a pickup. Of course if you want the sound of an amplified bass, then you use a pickup.
 
#14
A piezo pickup is my last resort in most situations—but especially in the studio. Even an inexpensive mic is usually a better option because the sound tends to be much more natural and realistic.

If you must use the piezo to record then I would recommend using an additional preamp to match the input impedance of the board you are plugging into.

I don’t like to make waves, especially when it’s not my session, but I have learned the hard way that it’s usually best to say you don’t have a pickup in these situations.
 
#17
bassbones2, to answer your question, "no". I like to use a mic & piezo when recording sometimes and you can certainly achieve a usable blend. Have fun. If you want to get a preamp "on the cheap" you could get a Behr!nger BEQ700 for ~$20...
 
#19
Jay Corwin said:
I second what Damon has to say here. My first experience recording on upright, I brought everything with me. My bass had a pickup installed on it, and the gentlemen running the session was like "oh you have a pickup" and ran it directly into some very nice pre on his board. I stated that I had my own pre....but it wasn't my gig and to be quite frank, I didn't really know what I was doing yet in that environment. So I just went with it. When I heard the initial mix I was kind of horrified, like I play that bad horrified. Every bit of piezo "noise" that you try to cut out with your own preamp was present. I could practically hear my breathing vibrating through the thing. I thought to myself, do I really make that much extra "noise" when I play. Turns out that I don't, but the piezo sure does.

Much later I was told, "yeah it was really hard to get a natural sound of your bass" when the album was being mixed. Live and learn. It was an experience that I gained from. I too remove my pickup before going to record now because of that experience, or rather inexperience on a couple peoples part.
Click to expand...
It seems like we've all got a story like that.

Years and years ago, I was stoked to get a call to play a jazz tune on a CD with tenor player James Clay. The studio was, I'm going to say, more a semi-pro operation at that point.

I got into it a bit with the engineer running the session because he wanted to use my (then Underwood) pickup as the sole way to record my bass. He said it "was easier" and that "they didn't have a lot of mics to go around".

Since I was not paying for the studio time, I just bit my tongue and fumed...knowing how it was going to turn out. It was a huge gut punch, going from being excited to record with a great musician, to "It doesn't matter what I do, this is going to sound like a _ _".

To this day, I can't listen to it.
 
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