Last night a friend helped me install a preamp (Bartolini AGB 918-2) in my bass. By helped, of course, I mean I double checked which wires he was rerouting where (he's always worked on passive guitars), and set up my amp to test it out when he was done.

It sounds amazing now! Since I no longer have to roll off the bass and mids nearly all the way, while boosting the treble to about 3/4, the noise floor has dropped to near nothing. This morning I tweaked the gain trimpot on the preamp. Now I can keep the bass volume at about 80% running through my Joyo American Sound, and a little extra for bypassing it without having to adjust at the amp.

Besides the pedal, which does an amazing job of copping a Fender amp feel, I recently bought an Ampeg 210 (AV) cabinet, and I'm searching for his twin brother. Together they'll make a fantastic stage rig. For the time being, it's great by itself at surprising volumes - perfect at practice and rehearsal volume. Actually, I imagine it would carry a small bar just fine.

Last night my daughter was watching The Daily Show on Hulu and they had a musical act called The Suffers on. They looked like an old school funk show band, which I love. Then they started playing, and it was even better than that. They're actually the most authentically awesome old school soul band I've seen in... well ever really. In fact, I would put Kam Franklin up against any soul singer from any era.



Then there's this one from last year.

As 40Hz already knows, I bought a new Schecter 5 string bass about the time I stopped posting to this thread last year. With a budget of only $400, I was actually planning to buy something used, which really sucks for a lefty. Fortunately for me, Schecter had discontinued this particular model, and I managed to get one literally a couple days before they became pretty much impossible to find. As a bonus, the new price was about what I'd probably get selling it used, so it was practically a zero risk purchase.

I fell in love with it the first time I played it, and I love it just as much now. It's everything I expected from a Schecterat that price (it normally sold for around $650 - $700), except for one annoyance. I say annoyance, but had I payed full price, or if I had to pay someone to fix the 1 design flaw I discovered, I'd be pretty pissed. Instead, I'm mildly annoyed with them, and more annoyed with myself for not tracking the issue down sooner.

To make a long story short (mark that on your calendar), Schecter put passive EMG pickups in the bass, which is fine, but then they paired them with the wrong EMG EQ module. EMG sells 2 OEM specific EQ stacks, one for active pickups (which most of theirs are) and another for passive pickups. Not being an OEM, I can't be sure, but I'm betting the active pickup (200k input impedance) version is cheaper than the passive (1M input impedance) one, because it doesn't need to include a buffer (which active pickups have) to avoid impedance loading the pickups. Even if they're the same price, generally, I know Schecter sells a bunch of basses with active pickups, so it would probably have increased the cost moderately to buy a separate (and smaller) batch of high impedance tone stacks).

Whatever their reasons, here's what the difference between 1M and 200k looks like on a frequency plot. They're different pickups, but the effect is fundamentally the same. There are actually 3 different impedance options listed, because it's for an Audere preamp with a variable impedance option. However, the Low Z and Mid Z plots are for the exact impedances for the active and passive pickup EQ modules, respectively. Not to mention that 1M is what every standard onboard preamp uses, and for the exact same reason.



Fortunately, it turns out Bartolini sells a reasonably priced buffer/preamp circuit, so I can fix it without buying an entire preamp/EQ unit. At this point, I can't say I even know what either the pickups or EQ sound like when wired properly, so it would be wasteful to replace them without finding out - especially at nearly half the original cost of the bass.