Double Bass Thinking of modding a Baby Bass

[bmusic]

Disclaimer: I'm a bass guitar player, but my son (a drummer) and I like to dabble in the double.

So I got a KK Baby Bass and really like the weight and feel and aesthetics of it, but the pickup, while endowed with a good amount of thump, lacks that snappy articulation.

So I got a Kremona piezo, and that's much better. I even took an old 1/4" adapter and a tapping bit and created a handy mount for the plug, because the supplied one doesn't work with the bb's tailpiece. And I like to tinker.

And that tinkering spirit has led me to wonder: can I infuse the piezo sound with some of the low-end from the built-in pickup, and blend them with a knob on the bass, and run the mix out to the amp on a single cable?

I do like the sound of this blend, having gotten a taste of it by running both outputs to two inputs of a QSC monitor and blending to taste. So if I want to get that effect with the simplicity and cleanliness of a single cable, is it as simple as drilling a small hole in the cover plate, snipping off the piezo's jack, shoving the wire through the hole, and connecting to a pan pot, along with the diaphragm pick-up, in place of the existing volume pot? Maybe turning the existing tone pot into a stacked master volume/tone?

I'm not even sure I need a tone control. If I get the attack (highs) from the piezo and the warm thump from the diaphragm, it seems like the panner will cover the tone shaping needs.

Or perhaps best of all: maybe I don't even need to control the respective balances with a pot at all. I could imagine just running both pickups to the existing volume pot (like the middle position on a Tele switch), setting the amount of the diaphragm pickup with the pickup height adjustment to get a balance I like, and then rocking that in set-it-and-forget-it mode.

And thoughts/suggestions? Caveats? What am I missing? Do I need to swap out the volume pot, and if so, for what specs?

 

[dylanjohnson]

Sounds like a phase nightmare, but if you can talk to someone who has an Azola reissue baby bass, those had a piezo and a diaphram pickup. I'm not sure if it was blendable.

 

[DoubleMIDI]

I don't recommend to mix any passive piezo signal without a buffer into another signal. To a certain extent it might work, but the piezo sound will suffer.
Just try it externally between pickups and amp. If you like it, proceed, if not you need a buffer before the mixing pot.

 

[Francois Blais]

You'd better run both pickups to a 2 channel preamp and mix there.
You can get a small preamp like this Dual Channel Pro Instrument Preamplifier which is about the cheapest and can probably be mounted on the BB but there are most expensive alternatives.

 

[ctxbass]

Some thoughts that may or may not help, you may have already addressed these issues -
What strings are on the bass? If it still has the original generic shipping strings, that is easily part of the problem. Spirocore Solos are much more suitable.
There are available adjustments to the pickups.
Besides the adjustable neck angle, there is also an adjustment that can be made to the tailpiece where it attaches to the bass. The combination of those play a large part in the feel and response of the KK bass. It took me a bit of trial and error before finding the sweet spot.

 

[Gruff]

I have a mandocello with a similar magnetic pickup and piezo pickup setup. It "sort of works" but the levels from the two pickups aren't really compatible - changing the balance pot means the volume changes. I'm thinking to change the 1/4" jack to a stereo (TRS) version - then take both signals out separately into a mixer. It should still work straight into a conventional amp, just with one pickup.