Stoner/DOOM Bassists thread part 37: Ancient Alien Fuzz

[JoeVictim]

Hmmmm this is a tough one, i was reserving the god spot for Iommi, as he is the true "father of the riff" IMO. Lemmy would be the god of rocking the fvck out, it is well known nobody rocks as hard as him.

The Son, The Father, and The Holy Smoke.

 

[Ancient Tone]

Wino, Saint of the Flatted Fifth
Mario Lalli, Saint of Reverb
Scott Reeder, Patron Saint of Safe Desert Travel.
Dixie Dave, Patron Saint of 15" speakers

I like this game!

hahaha awesome! Agreed this is a fun game! We should keep track of it and make a huge post. Maybe even make a post on facebook and tag all of them so they can get a chuckle as well.

 

[Ancient Tone]

The Son, The Father, and The Holy Smoke.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA this is getting better and better.

 

[father of fires]

You can also use this:

Just use the pickup sim part at the beginning. Everything before the word "Input".

Edit: You can skip C6 if you want. It's only there to mimic cable capacitance. R11 could be turned into a pot to use as a volume control.

 

[dunwichamps]

Wouldnt the basses onboard preamp still affect the overall tone? Allowing you to compensate for any frequencies lost in the pedal? (presuming it doesnt cause like a 20db in the high end or something like that) Still allowing your normal tone to come through with some minor tweaking?

yes/no combination of both onboard pre and the active to passive stuff

 

[Ancient Tone]

yes/no combination of both onboard pre and the active to passive stuff

Gotcha.

 

[eyeballkid]

This is what you need.

http://www.muzique.com/lab/pickups.htm

actually, now what I need is someone to explain that to me....lol.


you all lost me.... I'll see you in church.

 

[dunwichamps]

okay this works, and sims well 2, matches parameters of the AMZ article fairly well.

Invalid Link Removed

 

[bassboysam]

Hey, no graphs allowed!

 

[Toastfuzz]

Imagine the volume control as a water hose, turning it down decreases the hose diameter. The impedance is the water pressure, your active has very high water pressure, while a passive has very low. The pedal would take your large diameter hose (which is too big for some pedals) and decrease its size to a manageable level, and then take your high water pressure and also turn it down as well (so that your active bass plays with fuzz pedals like a passive bass). A regular volume pedal would just decrease the hose size, which would not really effect how the bass and pedals interact. This is theoretical though.

But wouldnt this defeat the purpose, since the signal would clip/overload at one of those bottlenecks, and negatively affect/flatten/compress your base tone? God conversing with us laypeople must be tiring for you engineer types

A random thought, since this would go at the front of an effects chain, and with the rising popularity why not include an adjustable HPF in it as well? It would basically be a signal conditioner for active basses for those who use alot of pedals.

This would be awesome.

Skip, you forgot:

Lemmy- God.

I vote for this. In any context you can think of, it is a true statement. Its the antithesis of placing 0 in the denominator of a fraction.

-------------

So I realized I was getting a bit ahead of myself on this active/passive project, as I have other projects that need worked on and I haven't even heard what it sounds like in passive mode yet. Tonight I'm gonna try wiring the pickup directly to the output jack, parallel mode, no pots or switches, just to demo the dang thing and see what it sounds like. I'll set up a constant recording source and record some active demos first, then do some recordings in passive mode to get a direct A/B comparison, before I really dig into messing with the switches and knobs. If all goes according to plan and I get outta here at 4:00, I should have some clips for y'all tomorrow morning.

 

[bassboysam]

Mesa PH412 showed up locally. Anyone ever try one?

 

[father of fires]

actually, now what I need is someone to explain that to me....lol.


you all lost me.... I'll see you in church.

most basic terms is that it raises the output impedance. So you put a buffered signal in and you get an unbuffered high impedance signal out.

 

[father of fires]

Or you know. Pedal designers could build for the modern musician instead of copying the days of old.

 

[dunwichamps]

the AMZ one is what i built into the JFET buffer setup. Should have a flat 0 to 25k output impedance with some kind of frequency response like a pup and also adjustable gain. if you want adjustable HPF it could be added 2

 

[father of fires]

Outside of huge volume differences the main reason you would want a passive simulator is if you're using a pedal that uses the impedance mismatch as a tone shaping tool (baddddddddd design!!!).

Because of the inductance of the pickup (along with with the resistance of you pots and capacitance of your cables) you get a pretty sharp LPF effect. If you don't need to sharply cut your highs then all you really need is to lower the volume of your bass which can be done with the volume on you bass.

 

[dunwichamps]

lowering the volume on an active bass wouldnt be bad in terms of the output swing but those pots are designed to remain fairly low impedance (maybe 50k pots) so that you wouldnt introduce much series impedance. The overall loading effects wouldnt be captured.

A FF circuit like oxfuzz would benefit from the pupsim on an active bass due to its fairly low impedance which loads down the source if its high impedance. Not sure if Ken designed it to keep this in or not. I know it has blend so it might avoid this whole problem but a normal FF sounds bad with buffering in front of it

 

[mc_muench]

Mesa PH412 showed up locally. Anyone ever try one?

Once, in a store so it only half counts, but I could tell it could crush. I really like mesa stuff, if I was going newer non-custom cabs, they would be mesa's.

 

[bassboysam]

lowering the volume on an active bass wouldnt be bad in terms of the output swing but those pots are designed to remain fairly low impedance (maybe 50k pots) so that you wouldnt introduce much series impedance. The overall loading effects wouldnt be captured.

A FF circuit like oxfuzz would benefit from the pupsim on an active bass due to its fairly low impedance would loads down the circuit. Not sure if Ken designed it to keep this in or not. I know it has blend so it might avoid this whole problem but a normal FF sounds bad with buffering in front of it

OxFuzz Bass is ok with active basses. not as good as using a passive but it's not as bad as a regular FF or the Ge OxFuzz with an active bass.

 

[father of fires]

lowering the volume on an active bass wouldnt be bad in terms of the output swing but those pots are designed to remain fairly low impedance (maybe 50k pots) so that you wouldnt introduce much series impedance. The overall loading effects wouldnt be captured.

A FF circuit like oxfuzz would benefit from the pupsim on an active bass due to its fairly low impedance would loads down the circuit. Not sure if Ken designed it to keep this in or not. I know it has blend so it might avoid this whole problem but a normal FF sounds bad with buffering in front of it

Agreed because there isn't that 5k roll off you get from passive pups when it meets the low input Z of the FF. I didn't realize he needed this for a FF type circuit. I missed that part of the conversation.

 

[dunwichamps]

Agreed because there isn't that 5k roll off you get from passive pups when it meets the low input Z of the FF. I didn't realize he needed this for a FF type circuit. I missed that part of the conversation.

i was sort of assuming he liked the sound of passive with fuzz instead of active so thats the example i normally find illustrative. Someone can clarify. Its sort of a backward solution to a "poor" design from an engineering stand point.