Preamp comparison - where to start

[DeadPoet]

Hi y'all,


a Lakland 55-64 with a John East jazz preamp deluxe in it has been my main bass for several years now. Since I wanted a Precision to go with that Jazz bass I ordered a custom 55-60 a few years ago and put a Uni-Pre in it.
Being not entirely happy with how the high-end is handled on that setup I decided to order an Audere preamp as well and finally got around to do some testing with all of those toys.

Yesterday I recorded 6 grooves in a large variety of setups:
- pickups wired direct to output jack (neck solo, bride solo, both in parallel)
- 'proper' passive setup: used the StackKnob faceplace from my 55-64 (again neck/br/both)
- Lakland's LH-3 preamp, both passive and active (no EQ applied) - again in N/Br/Both
- John East Uni-Pre 4knob - passive, active flat and active with the pre-shape - 3 pickup setups
- Audere ProZ - no EQ applied, recorded with LoZ, MidZ and HiZ - 3 pickup setups.


Though I only recorded 4 or 8 bars of each setup this is already over an hour of recording...

I want to upload this as a Youtube video - could be helpful for the entire community- but that's just way to long. I could cut down the 8bar grooves to 4 bars - but maybe I'll cut some of the performances away?

I mean, a slap groove with only bridge pickups soloed isn't really *that* intersting to listen to maybe?


No video unfortunately, I simply don't have the time for that - it'll be black screen with text.


Any ideas or stuff I missed?


TIA,
Herwig


PS: after some preliminary playing: that Z-switch on the Audere is magic! makes for 3 entirely different basses in one!!

 

[weirdmayo]

Lol, just stumbled upon this thread
just short message to say here: upload everything
even if something is not interesting to listen to really, the goal here isn't to entertain people, but to let people who are searching for something like this find it. If somebody was looking for a pickup routing comparison they would appreciate every bit of that audio, all 8 bars. Because if anything, they can just skip through it and find what they were looking for. More is better in these types of scenarios.

 

[winegamd]

You should look up some of Sean Fairchild/Combinators demo videos. He usually just plays a groove or pattern that he can consistently play identically each time, then does one or two bars for each configuration. For this type of stuff the audio is more important than the visual for sure. It may be better to do a video for each pre with similar time stamps for each video/configuration. Then a viewer could have different windows and click between them for quick references.

Our brains and ears only have a couple of seconds of memory recall to identify sonic differences. The quicker one can change between sounds, the easier it is for a listener/viewer to decipher the differences they may be hearing.