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Double Bass Shadow SH 965-NFX Nanoflex Pickup Problems

Carfax

Carfax

May 14, 2021
35
45
#1
I hope this rather general subject line is alright, since there is no thread dedicated to this pickup.

My Nanoflex vibrates/buzzes when I hit the E string.
It's not audible whilst playing, but I'm afraid the pickup might get damaged over time.

How did you mount your (non-buzzing) Nanoflex?
Did I do it the wrong way? (I liked the input to be vertical:)


IMG_20220208_195653812.jpg


IMG_20220208_195744810.jpg




This picture of someone else's made me wonder if it's the vertical position, what's causing the problem:

maxresdefault.jpg



Any ideas? Thanks very much in advance.
 

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#3
The mounting does not influence any buzzing. I do it 45 degree to have a longer underlength on the second highest string and a shorter for the highest one.

Open the battery adapter (four screws in the corners of the black part) and put some rubber foam air any other close cell foam in it. The PCB inside does rattle and if there is foam between PCB (underside) and case the rattling gets stopped. That‘s the only bad thing with the SH-965NFX but easily fixable.

The other thing I did was putting some adhesive Velcro (the softer part) under the black case of the pickup sensors. I’m not sure if it was needed, but I think it would help to avoid any rattling against the top.
 
#4
Thanks for the advice, Earl and DoubleMIDI!

I put in some rubber foam between the PCB and the cover, but with mixed results: the buzz was gone when I plucked the E string, but only to move to the G string. Playing Ab on that string caused unbearable buzzing.
I am not sure if opening that plastic box was such a good idea afterall, it seems a little flimsy to me.

Now I put a piece of felt on each side of the strings before screwing it together. The buzz is gone now. I hope it'll stay that way. I wonder if the felt would have been enough and I could have avoided putting foam in the box.

I really like the sound of the pickup, but wish some of its parts weren't that fragile.
 
#5
Shadow says that you can replace the battery adapter with their Rockabilly preamp, but that costs some money.

The foam doesn‘t hurt. Maybe on both sides of the PCB.

I place the battery adapter as close as possible to the tailpiece and at the two highest strings, letting the output jack show outward by 45 degrees. Therefor you have maximum underlength for the stiff lower strings, a medium one for the second highest and a shorter one for the highest. Also the contact length of string and battery adapter is larger.

The biggest problem is the black plastic nut to fix the battery adapter to the strings (or the plastic Thread it screws onto). It will slip on the thread if tightened too much. And that might be the reason why it rattles. It couldn‘t be tightened enough.
 
#8
I’ve also had the cables rattle against the top. At first I was looking at the battery box and even at cracks in the top. I tie them to the string afterlengths with a rubber band.

I love these pickups, something in the high mids really fits my bass.
 
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#11
I took two 1-2 mm rings of microphone cable isolation and fiddled the mini-TS plugs through it, one after the other. That way the cables are kept together. You can place them where you need them.
Then I fiddled the cables between E and A underlength and put the plugs into the battery adapter. By moving the cables at the two rings and orientation and position of the battery adapter I can avoid cable contact with the underlengths.
 
#13
You might be interested in my do-over of the battery box. I destroyed mine when I clumsily tried to change the battery during a gig. This is a new box and circuit without the volume and tone control. I had no use for them, but I did want a low-battery light.



Somewhere on the long list for possible projects is a setup with seperate volumes or a blend for the two pickups.
 
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#14
Matthijs said:
You might be interested in my do-over of the battery box. I destroyed mine when I clumsily tried to change the battery during a gig. This is a new box and circuit without the volume and tone control. I had no use for them, but I did want a low-battery light.



Somewhere on the long list for possible projects is a setup with seperate volumes or a blend for the two pickups.
Click to expand...
This link seems to bring up an error.
 
#17
Matthias Hacker said:
Looks nice Matthijs!
I cannot open the attached circuit, could you please try that again?
Click to expand...
It was just a link to the photo above. I don’t have a picture of the circuit itself. This was a very poorly documented project, sorry.

The design was very simple though. The battery power was distributed over the hot leads of the two pickups via two resistors. I could deduce the value from the original box. Then the DC content is filtered out from the output via a simple cap/resistor hpf filter for each pickup and I probably seperated the two pickups a bit with a inline resistor too.
The low-battery light circuit was a simple one transistor design I picked up somewhere online from an electronics forum.

If you want I can try to see if I can reverse engineer the actual values and circuit. I am a bit apprehensive because of what the actual electronics experts might say though :) It does work at least as well as the original box, and battery life is just as good.
 
#18
That would be really nice!
I tried once to measure the values and to understand the circuit of the original power supply box, but I completely failed. I´d like to have a one channel only box with the original tone control and an additional adjustable 1.grade high pass filter. I tried to make a high pass filter out of the original volume pot, but that did not work the way I thought it should. No electronic expert policemen around here, are they? ;)
 
#19
Having listened to this pickup both live and on a plethora of YouTube videos, I know that it's sound wouldn't work for me, on my bass and with my ear. I've never been a fan of pickup controls that mount to the tailpiece.
The Ischel has one, along with a whole group of other pickups and the Realist Docking Station. That said, it seems to be a popular pickup among a whole group of Talkbass members. So, it obviously works for many bassists
Just my take of course.
 
#20
Ric Vice said:
Having listened to this pickup both live and on a plethora of YouTube videos, I know that it's sound wouldn't work for me, on my bass and with my ear. I've never been a fan of pickup controls that mount to the tailpiece.
The Ischel has one, along with a whole group of other pickups and the Realist Docking Station. That said, it seems to be a popular pickup among a whole group of Talkbass members. So, it obviously works for many bassists
Just my take of course.
Click to expand...

I agree about the tailpiece mounted pickupcontrols.

Imo/ime pickups need to fit as a good suit: they need to be tailored to your basses individual curves. This pickup does that for my bass. It also can be amplified very loud, something I need in the loud bigband like settings I mostly play in. It has a distinct mid and upper mid presence that fits the voice of the bass that a lot of other pickups lack. It’s not as warm and dark as ie several realist pickups I tried. But those gave me a hard to control low end on my bass. It is not mbol, but there’s also no distinct piezo sound, at least what I percieve as a piezo sound. I do often need to tame the lower mid region a bit though.
 
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