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too many pickups

T

TheShreddingE

May 4, 2008
34
2
#1
I am a lover of modern bass tech, vintage holds little value to me. I love the punch, crunch and growl of modern electronics. And if i was going to build a bass, i was considering filling the whole thing with pickups. I know that is stupid and a circuitry nightmare, but i just like the idea.

So how many pickups is too many, and what problems could it cause?
 
#2
bootsy-collins-thumb-480x685.jpg


ask bootsy.
 
#5
The Bootsy 5 pickup bass seems to be an anomaly. I think if it sounded great there would be imitations of the design. Wouldn't the cumulative capacitance and all those pots suck the tone out the bass? that's probably why it has 3 Aguilar ODP-3 preamps. since there is only 1 set of EQ knobs they must have wired all the preamps together to make one huge preamp. too way over the top, even for me

bootystar4.jpg
 
#6
BassLife77 said:
The Bootsy 5 pickup bass seems to be an anomaly. I think if it sounded great there would be imitations of the design. Wouldn't the cumulative capacitance and all those pots suck the tone out the bass? that's probably why it has 3 Aguilar ODP-3 preamps. since there is only 1 set of EQ knobs they must have wired all the preamps together to make one huge preamp. too way over the top, even for me

bootystar4.jpg
Click to expand...


It's not the capacitance of tone controls that you have to worry about. That bass doesn't even have a passive tone control on it. It's the decrease in resistance across the pickups that you get by running a bunch of pots in parallel. The total resistance can be calculated as RTotal​=1/([1/R1​]+[1/R2​]+...[1/Rn​])

On the other hand, if it indeed has three preamps, the sets of pickups and controls are buffered so that they won't load against each other.
 
#7
I'm not saying the idea has no merit, but in terms of one song, or two or even a set of them, how many different settings do you really need, and would you use them all? Would you default to certain settings, and if so, why not just build the bass with those few default, most used settings.

Like I keep telling people about electronic drumsets with "only" 27 different drum kits in the brains as opposed to some uber expensive ones which have twice as many or more- how many are you REALLY going to use? Aren't you really going to default to a few as main sounds, and maybe occasionally dabble in the rest?

I'm not opposed to more being better, or making more options, etc... but just the notion of pragmatic use in conjunction with usage patterns, tendencies and needs, comes to my mind.
 
#16
line6man said:
On the other hand, if it indeed has three preamps, the sets of pickups and controls are buffered so that they won't load against each other.
Click to expand...

ok that explains it. them using 3 preamps in one bass seems crazy. the output must be so high it overloads the front end of any amp its plugged into. cant find a schematic or a picture of the guts so it must not have sold very well.
 

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