Passinwind

Heh! I've been avoiding getting the right tooling, as I really don't savor going deeper down this rabbit hole. It seems unavoidable these days though.

Another DIY onboard preamp, a two bander that is meant to be mounted to a Noll/MEC concentric tone pot: While I wait for the pots to show up I can at least test the rest of the build, so I've hardwired in external pots and mounted this one in stomp box for the moment. I may well throw this into my open source design stew along with a few more things I;ve been working up while on house arrest. I'm curious as to how many of my fellow DIY'ers are comfortable in building with surface mount parts? For those who are, how fine pitch do you go with hand soldering? Many of my newer designs use 1210, 1206, and a few 0805 pieces, and SO-8 opamps. The 0805 ones make me a little cranky on a bad day, but for the most part they're no real problem even without using a magnifier. The board above is ~1.6" by 1". I'll finally have some pedal builds to show soon as well. I've been playing with some old DSP boards that came in a grab bag along with all kinds of other goodies. Finally got around to listening to one the other day and was very pleasantly surprised by how good it sounds.

I've been very busy doing DIY board layouts lately. More like onboard preamps and a bass amp board retrofit than effects per se, but this thread seems the closest in spirit, I think. So: New three band preamp that went into my Marco Bass MV fretless a week or so ago: And the new main preamp board for my 500 watt DIY bass amp build from 2015: Which is waiting on an opamp shootout tomorrow before completion and installation, which I hope to have done by week's end. There's a new daughtercard containing a one band full parametric EQ and a variable high pass filter as well.

The cool thing about the Rane is that you can add or subtract blocks at will, and put them in any order you like. You can also make blocks switchable on a pedal, and even use an expression pedal for some parameters. So you could turn off a tweeter in your "dirty cab" when using distortion, or add different EQ and compression settings to the dirty signal, and so on. There's a good Windows GUI and lots of memory for presets, all of which makes it a lot more user friendly than you'd think at first look. But to be honest, I use it more for testing crossover alignments before building passive ones than anything else. Burning an hour or three on the computer is much cheaper than buying box loads of big inductors!

But, but...I needed time to come back with a quality post to really show the love. Yeah, that's the ticket! Here's one of my many multiamping follies: http://passinwind.com/RaneRPM26zBassRig.html And for those who prefer to avoid clickbait in these troubled times:

I've had this oddball Heritage from the old Gibson factory in Kalamazoo for quite a few years now:

I pretty much stopped eating out and going to live shows more than once a month or so at the same time I retired from gigging. Gig money was my play money, so no play = no pay. But this could just be a phase for me, wouldn't be the first time! For me it'll be a much bigger loss if my weekly house jam down the street goes away. The host and many of the players already had plenty of health issues, and the jam space is quite small and often crowded. So I think it will have to evolve to only being three or four people, when a dozen plus over the course of a night used to be pretty common. But I will find a way to keep jamming, no two ways about that. I have a lot of friends on the production side of live music too, and a lot of local club and restaurant owners are good friends as well. There's so much uncertainty for all of them right now, yeesh.

Same here, so the odds are pretty good I'm done with regular gigging. I actually already made that decision a couple of years ago though. These recent developments just mean I may well be done with attending live music shows in clubs too, unfortunately.

Say what? BGM was still very much alive as of last week, what happened?

Pedants 'R Us: a notch filter won't boost at the center frequency, so it's probably not the right tool here. If you can describe the problerm you're trying to fix maybe we can collectively work through it? With a full PEQ it's a tricky deal, because using much boost with a narrow bandwidth tends to promote ringing (oscillation), something you may see on an oscillosope well before you can hear it, and unfortunately a potential speaker killer. The area around 250Hz is a very important range, it can equate to "mud", room resonance, what some people think of as "punch", and so on. FWIW, the PEQ design in my amps can get as narrow as 1/20th of an octave. I can't recall ever using that setting with bass guitar though. 1/3rd or even 1/6th octave, maybe.

Cool. I attended one of the shows that made it onto that album; I believe the Not Fade/Going Down The Road/Not Fade medley is from the show I saw in New York, my first one actually. This is pre-Wall Of Sound, but I saw that in action a number of times as well.

The bass intro which starts at just after 5:00 in this version often featured the biggest Phil Bombs, especially during the Wall Of Sound era. Always loved playing this myself in various hippie bands I played in over the 70s and 80s.

Don't own any myself, but IMO they're great cabs and Roger and Linda Baer are hard working, top shelf people.

Mostly the same as applying any form of EQ - it depends. One immediate problem is that true PEQ requires at least three or four gain stages, and that means a fair bit of current consumption. So right off, putting it off the bass is mostly a better choice IMO and IME. Gain staging is critically important and in my own designs I prefer to have gain controls both pre and post any EQ blocks that might actually get set with a lot of gain or cut. In most of my DIY amps I have a single band full parametric stage after bass and mids, but before the treble section. That minimizes how many stages boosted treble signal goes through, which helps signal to noise ratio a lot. For bass guitar I tend to use it more like a tilt control than a surgical boost/cut with a narrow bandwidth. For something like upright bass just the opposite though, and putting the PEQ after bass and mids lets me massge unwanted interactions between those controls. PEQ can be a tweaky thing and for most people using it on the fly is apparently just overwhelming. Hence the dumbed down semi- PEQ we see in many implementations. As a long time sound provider I am very used to quick on the fly tweaks, especially for feedback suppression. As a bass player I tend to set it once for room correction and call it done. Horses for courses.

I owned a Tri 112L for a while. For me a decent pairing was with a Euphonic Audio CxL-112 that I already had. A fEARful 12/6 worked pretty well too. But having heard many multi-AG rigs, I'd recommend just going that route if at all possible.

Nothing to think about over here; everything for a while has been cancelled by government mandate. Some venues are just closing permanently right off, but so far it seems to be more restaurants than music venues doing that.

The same one I play 90+ percent of the time anyway. 😎

Around here before virtually all gigs were verboten there were a few venues limiting attendance, such as running at 1/3rd legal capacity in one case. So in that case I'd assume that they'd just dispense with the bands completely if they could already fill that many seats on a given night.

Dark Star - Grateful Dead In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed -- Allman Brothers Band Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin

Here's one I'm working on for my friends at Marco Bass, and starting to contemplate keeping. The neck is roasted maple and actually brings even more bling than the flake finish.

At NAMM I saw a 100 watt power amp that fits on the end cap of a very slick modular pedalboard system. I let a number of bass players know about it and asked them to go pitch the manufacturer on doing a bass oriented one as well, which to me means 300 watts at minimum. That's also probably about the most power we might expect to fit in your scenario, and as a semi-pro builder I'd want about 8 by 6 by 3 inches for a proper enclosure that would meet safety and EMC certifications. An actual pro could do better than that though, I'm sure. So, how much space is there under your pedalboard, exactly? And do you see a market for a few thousand sales a year over several years, minimum? Speaking of which, a lot of these small-ish boutique power amps are not strictly legal in the US at this time. I see that as potentially playing with fire, both literally and figuratively. YMMV. Over here there's a loophole for not-for-sale test builds, but I'm still generally pretty careful about who I let try my various DIY bass amp and power amp builds out on stage.

Si, Did you try the Jule Simone 500 we had in the Marco Bass booth at NAMM this year? I didn't get to play through it much (or anything else in the booth really), but it and the matching tube preamp generated a lot of interest, for sure. The GR guys were right around the corner too, but I didn't notice if there was a Pure 800 amp there.

RIP. I saw him play many times and it was a joy every single time, from tiny club dates with the PMG to an arena show with Joni Mitchell.

Just reacquired this DIY modular preamp/amp build from 2015. Traded away an even older modular rack build for it, as my luthier freind already has one of my similar all in one amps and the pictured rig was a bit redundant.

IMHO, the market has voted and old obsolete stuff lost. Whatever remains of that technology isn't obsolete...yet. Pretty much the same way it works with the tunes we play, or don't.