Passinwind

I can totally relate to that even though earlpug gigs are far in the rear view mirror for me. I built a pretty sweet rack tube preamp several years ago at great expense but just never ended up taking it out on very many gigs, and eventually I traded it out and built a compact solid state amp that sounds 97% as good and stopped sweating that last three percent. 😉

I've only heard the Simone prototype that was in the NAMM booth I worked at in 2020. We had a Monique in the same booth in 2018 as well. I think Jule reworked Simone a good bit after that show, and we were also using different power amps and maybe cabs with each preamp. They were both cool but the Monique was really in another time zone for me, as it should be given the price difference. Jule is super cool and just a great guy to hang out with in any case.

I let a friend whose day job involves hand soldering SMT parts take a crack at building one of my new three band preamps: The board itself came from DigiKey's new-ish fabrication service, it gets a thumbs-up from me.

Look at Schatten Design's offerings if you change your mind on budget. I've not heard them in the flesh yet but I had a nice chat with Mr. Schatten at the last Winter NAMM and was very impressed by his build quality. If you are comfortable with DIY building then some variation of the ubiquitous Tillman circuit is a great low cost solution. I do have an open source/non commercial buffer in the works, but if you need a little gain and very low cost the Tillman may be your jam.

Original music with full band backing including real drums, no play alongs or "covers." 3-5 minutes tops, with very minimal talking if any. You have 15-20 seconds to convince me to keep watching, use it wisely.

Normally when you switch into passive mode the power doesn't actually get switched off, the signal path just changes and the preamp stays in standby to avoid the nasty switching pop I alluded to. With a standard preamp bypass switching scheme like that it's no problem to port to a passive tone control, and Noll sells a cool tone pot meant to allow for exactly that (ie active section and passive section on one control shaft), although I think it works even better with the passive tone control section just always being engaged, a la Sadowsky. Noll set it up so the passive part only engages at settings below 12 o'clock, which is quite clever. While unfortunately that pot is not suitable for a MM preamp, it works perfectly for many of the other usual suspects though. It still won't help you in a two hole control build however, as it's not in a concentric format. Best of luck!

That's quite a big ask, I would just use at least three pots personally. I can do custom preamps to a fairly high standard but I'm in the US and it wouldn't be cheap for what you want. I'm also quite backed up at the moment. You'll need a very custom tone pot, for starters. This is the only readily available option I'm aware of: https://www.omeg.co.uk/potentiometers/unswitched/p20/p20-3-concentric/ You'll most likely need to buy at least ten of those pots, but you can try pinging Omeg and see if they are willing to do a one-off for you. And then it has to fit in your cavity route, how deep will yours be? A two gang one (ie no passive option) will fit in even a standard Fender route just fine though IME. But again, there are no stock ones like that AFAIK, you will have to custom order. I recently went through that with a different needed feature set and Omeg were great to deal with. If you used a pickup selector and only one volume control you could do volume/passive tone on a concentric pot, I think this is a better bet. Power switching without transient pops is problematic as well, but a typical MM preamp draws so little power that I wouldn't bother.

Thanks for the mention of my non-commercial DIY option. There's a new one now without the conventional bass and midrange bits as well. It still won't really clone a Wal, as that's never been a design goal for me. But there are at least a couple of guys working off "my" general blueprint (which I borrowed from friends at their request) who might take things more in that direction and might make that a commercial thing. They can de-lurk if and when that comes to pass, I reckon. 😉 I recommend the ACG/East ones all the time, and not just for the soldering impaired. Hope it works well for you.

Never mind that, how's the bass John?

A different and much more modest enclosure vendor mentioned it to me and added that they didn't recommend it, but would have no way of knowing if I'd done it, wink wink nudge nudge. I've bought a whole lot of stuff from Front Panel Express as they are nearly local to me, do great work very quickly, and customer service often comes right from the CEO, who really knows her shizz. They are a bit on the expensive side though, for sure. But if sticker shock appeals look at Protocase, who I used once because no one else was able to offer what they claimed to. That worked out fine eventually but there were a few too many twists and turns along the way for my liking. Interestingly enough, Protocase give you a DXF and a 3-D model as part of what you pay for and seem to assume you'll be using them the next time for production with some other vendor...wonder why? 😉

You can export to DXF from the Front Panel Express software, or so I've heard...😉

I used to get at least 20 solos per gig in my jazz bands and inevitably you come up with many different approaches. For me the key to keeping the audience engaged is to learn the melody to every song you play and jump off from there. That way it's still musical even if everyone drops out, as they often do in arguably less savvy bands. Real jazzbos won't tend to be impressed if you just quote the heads too often, so I always tried to mix it up with other approaches too. It got a lot easier after the first few thousand and even the bluegrass guys I play with these days like to bust my chops by calling bass solos on some very unlikely tunes. I often whip out my slide and play dobro parts when they do that, but it just seems to egg them on. Fine by me though. 😎 In my own duo band it's often been just bass and drums and I hardly ever take solos. The drummer takes dozens though, and people seem to like it just fine.

I've used several of the very nice Modu enclosures, shipping cost to the US is the biggest drawback and some of the bigger sizes tended to require additional bracing that I had to fabricate myself, although in retrospect I'll bet I could have paid them to do it for me. Good call on the panel IMO, it usually seems that buy once, cry once really applies here.

The BSX website calls ~15 lbs. for the four string models.

As @Phil Starralluded to, actual overall slope will be very amp-dependent and if you use other pedals that will factor in as well. I've been workimg up an open source standalone HPF for a while now and getting the same play feel as the ones in my DIY amps is still a work in progress. But then again, most people probably won't want to duplicate that particular play feel anyway.😉

Yep, I've been messing with slide bass regularly since the early '70s. My original inspiration came mostly from having heard Phil Lesh play with a wine bottle as slide on a pre-Grateful Dead gig with the Warlocks via a bootleg recording on reel to reel. For most of that time my preferred instrument was my '77 Travis Bean fretless. I've made a number of my own slides, like so, bronze in this case: A couple of years ago I sold the Bean after 40 years of enjoyment and had my friend Marco Cortes build me a new Marco Bass Guitars fretless with slide playing as an implicit design goal: The electronics are still a work in progress, as I haven't settled on how to best leverage that XLR output jack.

I'm very lucky to be able to play gear that was either built by personal friends here in the USA, or by myself in my own tiny home workshop. The actual parts used are a mixed bag as far as country of origin though. What do I like about it? The passion and expertise that went into making it, mostly.

It certainly could be if so desired, but it's primarily meant to be used with an outboard pot and sweep range will be readily adjustable by a few component changes during building. The basic format is taken from my various DIY amps and preamps over the least several years and is pretty well vetted. It's a little different from the usual suspects in that it only requires a simple single gang pot for frequency adjustment and it also doesn't fit neatly into a "cookbook" filter alignment, because I tend to prefer not just cloning other people's circuits.

And here's what the first test build looks like: If all goes well this will be another open source noncommercial share for DIYers, it's not a tough build at all for those with even a little SMD hand soldering exoerience.

Omeg will make you as few as ten quite happily actually. I just recently stumbled upon that info when I needed some dual reverse log pots with long threaded bushings, which actually shipped out from their UK ship yesterday. Even with international shipping the price for a dozen was not prohibitive by my standards, but @disssa's solution would certainly be more cost effective. In my case I can just use cheap Tayda supplied Alpha pots for stompbox builds of the same filter preamp circuit, so I do. 😉

Higher HPF frequencies are fab for allowing greater bass control boost settings without mud and the aggregate response curve can move the peak frequency all over the place, allowing you to dance around room resonance nodes. The venerable Pultec studio EQ exploits a similar sort of synergy, it’s not a new idea by any means.

I decided to give Tayda's inexpensive UV printed enclosures a try: Time from ordering to receiving them in my mailbox was nine days, not bad at all. I'm also trying JLCPCB for some test HPF boards, which shipped three days from order date: Those boards are just upwards of 2" x 1" and could even fit in a bass pretty easily, I reckon.

Yep, Jamerson and Jaco both would have sounded and looked much better playing Alembics and I would've married a supermodel. Yeah...that's the ticket! 😉

Nope, my main bass was a gift. 😉

Definitely so at the live show I saw eons ago in Toronto. The energy level went up exponentially when Young came on, and I normally can't stand the guy at all, with a few exceptions here and there.