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to use powered mixer or combo amp as preamp?

B

benrutschilling

Dec 15, 2013
4
0
#1
Hello guys,

I'm new to the talk bass forums. I've been reading on It for quite a while but this is my first post.

my dilemma is should I use my samick 15 watt combo amp or my Samson xml610 powered mixer as my preamp for my rig?

the rest of my rig is as follows
fuzz face pedal
crown ce1000 amplifier
alesis 3630 rack stereo compressor with gate
homemade 1x15 cabinet

thanks in advance, and looking forward to posting more..
 
#4
Also, given that you only have a 1X15, I would just use the powered mixer as your amp for now. Plug a speaker output into the 1X15, and your good to go.

Using the mixer as a pre into a power amp is only going to give you the same tone as your powered mixer, just more wattage behind it.
 
#9
You are giving yourself two bad choices here. You at least nead a direct box (DI) to work with your mixer, and for a little bit more money than a dedicated DI box, you should be able to find a more useful pre-amp that you can run straight to your power amp. Be careful, though. Some of the cheaper bass "pre-amp" pedals out there don't actually have enough line output signal to drive a power amp effectively.

As for the compressor, I don't know the model, but it's a general-purpose studio compressor that I doubt would "suck for bass", but you'd probably have to play around with the settings a bit to get the sort of compression that's musical on a bass guitar.
 
#12
A low impedance line input don't fits to passive pickups.
But I don't see any arguments why a line input shall not fit to an active instruments out.
DI is nice to have but not all the time necessary.
Even on stage a DI may sometimes be obsolete.
 
#13
ThisBass said:
A low impedance line input don't fits to passive pickups.
But I don't see any arguments why a line input shall not fit to an active instruments out.
DI is nice to have but not all the time necessary.
Even on stage a DI may sometimes be obsolete.
Click to expand...
Maybe people weren't clear enough. Instrument pickup circuits have a very high impedance, because of the way they are built and work - lots and lots of windings around magnetic cores. If you plug it into an amp or mixer "line in" jack that's designed around the industry standard for bridging between electronic devices, it will be able to extract some signal, but the level will be low and the frequency response will be highly distorted, losing lots high frequencies. It "works" but it sounds like sh*t. Active pickups put out more signal, which helps, but they are still designed around the expectation of a high impedence input channel. You can use that kind of hookup for casual practicing at home, but not for recording or performance.

Some mixers have high-impedence options on their 1/4" inputs, but it's not the industry standard and not something one can assume going into a gig, unless one is providing the board.
 

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