so today was the first time i used my amp while playing with people. drummer guitarist, 4 trumpets 4 trombones tube sax section, the works. My amp worked great with my upright, got nice and loud, but with a passive p bass and a passive j i felt like i shouldnt have to be turning up the 350 3/4 of full volume to get a nice volume that works well. what do i need to balance this out, a signal booster of some sort? i want the levels to be equal, id like to boost my passive bass to the save volume level as my upright or an active bass that i plugged into it. what do i do?
I would use an attenuator on your upright bass. There is no need to keep amplifying the signal to dirty up your sound. By reducing the output of the upright to that of the p and j, you should be in business. You can purchase attenuators that will do this. They will usually be in decibels or dB's. I think a 3 or 6 dB attenuator should help on the upright.
nah, i lower the gain for upright and have to raise it to about 3/4 to compete with my electric. and as far as eq goes, i have a slight boost in the mids and in the bass, flat treble. the aural enhancer is just barely on and thats about it. could it be that the bass 350 is only putting somewhere around 200 wats into the goliath jr??
200 W would be plenty for an otherwise acoustic band, even with multiple horns. I agree about cutting the level on the upright. If you want to do it yourself, a capacitor in parallel with the piezo pickup will attenuate it without affecting the frequency response. Otherwise, live with it. So long as you are not distorting, don't be afraid of high knob settings. Just for reference, my 180 W into a 1x12 can overwhelm a 19-piece big band consisting of old guys who can blow their nuts off.
alright, i just feel like i should have more headroom for what it is. i actually was contemplating building your blender, its got some crazy gain to it, like 40db pre and 20 db post right? thats rediculous, plus i love building things and working on electronics, well see if that helps any. its not really too bad, it works real well i jsut feel like i should be able to get it to go louder, i plugged in a fender active p/j the school had and it had some balls to and was way louder than my passive bass. ill live.
That's right. The blender has 60 dB overall gain. One reason is I suppose that I didn't know how much gain I really needed at the outset for the unusually weak output of my DIY upright bass pickup. For mainstream use, reducing the gain of the final stage might not be a bad idea. Also, there is a 12 dB gain preamp circuit at the Jensen Transformer website (said to be for piezo pickups, but it should work fine for electric) which is really easy to build.
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