Passinwind

On 25/03/2023 at 10:36, basstone said:

The usual balance circuit uses a dual gang pot just for the "blend" and I've never seen a stacked pot with dual gangs?

https://www.noll-electronic.de/potentiometer/

Go to "DOUBLE SHAFT (STACKED) MULTI-FUNCTION."

Not an inexpensive solution though. 

5 hours ago, Chienmortbb said:

I find that strangely attractive and at least available the world over.

Agreed, but for less than 5 dollars more you could just have Tayda do a UV print directly on that box before they send it to you with all the rest of the parts. Nice to have options in any case!

A contributor to my ongoing open source preamp project submitted this idea for an inexpensive FR-4 pedal fascia plate sourced from JLCPCB:

They offer several other board colors as well, and their turnaround time is typically very short. I'm spoiled by having a really great local option for direct UV printing, but that seems to be far from the norm, unfortunately.

6 hours ago, ped said:

Guys where's good to buy a pink LED for a pedal? It's for an older DOD type, not sure if that matters...

The Tayda ones are very inexpensive and look great IMO.

2 hours ago, miles'tone said:

Amazing thread! Thanks, but building one is well beyond me unfortunately. I applaud your abilities though! If you ever make some more pedals to your designs please hit me up. I'll have one!

 

The Broughton pedal (Thanks for the link) is out of stock and I'd rather send my cash to a fellow Basschatter 😉

Any plans to build more?

@Chienmortbb will be able to do that for you sooner or later. On the continent @itu may be willing to do some as well. I'm actually just putting the finishing touches on a more DIY friendly pedal design layout, my own builds use surface mount parts and tend to scare off most home builders. I have no financial interest in any of it, and I've only sold around a dozen pedals over the last 7 years, nearly all to local musician friends.  This one is for upright bass and will be done in the next day or two:

And yeah, one could build pretty much any of the usual commercial suspects into a pedal enclosure fairly easily.

49 minutes ago, lidl e said:

@Passinwind makes a pedal that does what the Wal electronics basically do.

So does Josh Broughton, and you don't have to put his together yourself !  https://www.broughtonaudio.com/product-page/resonant-filter-equalizer

I'm in the process of doing a Github page for my open source designs, which are currently undergoing substantial revision to make them more pedal friendly, but for the moment the most thorough treatment can be found here:  https://www.talkbass.com/wiki/pw3b-lpf-open-source-onboard-preamp/

On 03/03/2023 at 14:53, NickA said:

All Wal pickups are passive in that voltage come out of them without putting any in.

 

..gotta say, this Wal obsession is getting a bit crazy.  As a Wal nut, Wal fanboy and owner of two of them I follow it avidly .... But is there a similar thread where people are trying to re engineer an Alembic series 2 or a Smith black Tiger.   And if not, why not?

 

I know of a few people who have cloned some of the Alembic onboard electronics formats very faithfully, but more so using modern variants of the early Bisonic pickups (Dark Star et al) rather than copying Series basses.

Yet another resonant LPF based EQ pedal, this time tweaked a bit for upright bass duty:

23 hours ago, AndyTravis said:

Jack Casady - I had no clue who he was, but 34” hollowbody and looks ace.

 

Was a Les Paul Signature Gibson bass before and Epiphone.

 

then I started listening to his back catalogue. Quite a player. Also did an ace solo album I really enjoyed.

Jack Casady was an utter legend for people in the US around my age, not in small part because of the very high profile appearance of Jefferson Airplane in the Woodstock movie. He was pretty much the first documented adopter of active basses as well, at least by many accounts.

And of course his current signature basses aren't even active, although they do share some Alembic-ish DNA.

Love the look, the tone is fine by me  too.

4 minutes ago, lidl e said:

Cant have a filter based preamp discussion without passinwind! 

 

When i first started looking, you answered all my questions.

Oddly enough, at least half of the ones I have sold didn't even go to bass guitar players. With a few minor tweaks they also work really well for acoustic guitar, mandolin, and upright bass, FWIW.

Glad to hear you found a solution that works for you!

12 minutes ago, lidl e said:

Come on over. You can rock on mine!

 

There are also outboard ones in a pedal enclosure which mught work better, or at least to try before you buy.

 

@Passinwind makes a cool looking one 

Thanks for the shout out. I've only ever sold a handful to friends, it's not a commercial thing at all. But someone else has now ported my design to a 125B enclosure format that will be also much simpler to build than my open source ones.

These are my latest versions, as you can see feature creep is a real thing:

Motown on a tiny AM radio, broadcast out of New York City. And after that the typical progression: British Invasion, San Franscisco Hippie/Woodstock Bands, fusion jazz. But none of that has stayed with me in the sense of still actively listening to it all that much. After fusion jazz I was in my 20s and I started to listen to more old school jazz, then really outside stuff from any era.

29 minutes ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

 

 

Thanks for making me aware of the existence of that shop though, wasn't aware hat anything like that existed, definitely something I will consider in the future, even if having to pay an import fee many times what an order from there is likely going to cost isn't exactly optimal.

 

Also tape is ready at hand, cheap, easy to fit, to apply and remove, for trying out stuff.

 

They make a wide variety of other variants, and at least used to offer custom formats too. I have an unfortunate preference for custom made wood ones,  and even without tax, import duties, etc. they are often very expensive.

1 hour ago, Baloney Balderdash said:

You can get it in quite a variety of colors, but I don't think any too funky, and almost certain not metallics and sparkle, since it is made for the purpose of being used with wiring (like for covering wire splicings and similar), hence the name electrical, or insulating, as it is also called, tape.

 

But you might be able to get tape with those kind of qualities made from a similar flexible rubber like plastic material.

 

 

Just curious: why tape? To me something like what these folks offer would be much nicer: 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/114677753582

17 hours ago, Phil Starr said:

Hey Charlie I see you are sneaking black cabs into the house

 

Busted! 🤣

But yeah, my wife has come to prefer that to my making sawdust and a generally huge mess out on our deck.

1 hour ago, BassmanPaul said:

Charlie you're using a Canadian amp manufactured a couple of miles east along Kingston Road from my home!!

 

Whoda thunk!

I know Paul, and it completely blew away the little Phil Jones head I tried first. Traynor put some very clever engineering into that head, you can readily download the service manual and see for yourself.

I've been retired from gigging for a few years now, so I downsized my carry rig last year to something more in tune with the semi-acoustic Americana oriented jam I play most Friday nights:

I was gifted the homemade Baltic Birch 110 cab, which the former owner made to accommodate the little G-K MB Class D heads. The Traynor SB-200 head I put in there suits me surprisingly well and the whole thing weighs 26 lbs. The tiltback wedge doubles as a cable storage door on the top back of the cab, which I think is pretty clever. That's an Eminence Deltalite II 2510 driver, which is more than overkill for what I use it for. The guy who gave it to me bought both my huge heavy 115 cabs and as I was leaving he happened to ask what I was going to use at home now, then pulled this thing out and asked if I wanted it.  He had a second one he previously sold, and I had heard the pair on a few of his gigs and jumped on his offer right quick. And of course I never use it at home, because I sold off my wonderful 112 cab and replaced it with an even more wonderful 118 from the same manufacturer.

34 minutes ago, Sibob said:

 

That cap positioning under the IC's is......novel haha.

 

Si

Yeah, I had missed that he omitted the local bypass caps until after he'd finished everything else up. The 3D render of the other side also shows them there, FWIW.

37 minutes ago, bartelby said:

 

 

would it be possible to get the schematic for this please?

 

It'll be posted up in the Talkbass Wiki shortly, along with the bill of materials. The Gerbers will be available too so one can use any PCB fabricator they choose to. Eventually PedalPCB will have their own version as well. For whatever reason this whole project seems more popular outside the US, so I've been trying to accommodate that and move beyond my personal favorite parts vendors over here. And most people just don't want to mess with SMD parts, which I have been using more and more myself, and that's fine. Mostly I'm just happy to have someone else doing the grunt work, especially the documentation. I'm not all that fast with it and it consumes a pretty silly amount of my time.

This week I'm working on one for upright bass, where my preliminary tests have challenged conventional wisdom on input impedance for piezo pickups pretty seriously. But I need to sit down with the owner of that bass and do some systematic A/B work, which I hope to get to by next week. She has a wonderful carved bass and any excuse I get to play it is very welcome!

Someone else has finally jumped into my long running open source hybrid filter preamp project with a 125B size version using parts single sourced from Tayda Electronics:

Jamerson would have sounded immensely better with an Alembic. Or better yet an upright. And no, I'm not joking.

Or am I? 😉

Just checking back in, I really appreciate the hard numbers being presented here and there. I'm presently working on some new open source pedal adaptations of the resonant LPF format, expecially for acoustic-electric instruments, including upright bass. I'm kind of diverging further away from Wal territory, as the frequency sweeps on mine are going as high as 8kHz in some cases and my default is something like 500-6.5kHz. In pedals I find I can leverage more uptown higher current opamps and really jack the max filter gain up without incurring unwanted distortion, and all distortion is pretty much unwanted at the moment. 😉

I've also been talking to a couple of different pickup winders, looking for the absolute least overt coloration/voicing possible. Maybe not so much for the end product though, but I am trying to do what passes for actual science here and reducing variables is the way forward in my case, I reckon.

Lots of great work and I'm always appreciative of demo recordings too. 

Not my laughably poor penmanship, but photos and even where to get one of my hobby "company's" logo T-shirts one year at NAMM. Apparently I'm quite famous in Indonesia...who knew? 😆

1 hour ago, JPJ said:

Just a thought, but a powered cab would make a lot of sense for me at the moment. As I am about to build a Basschat 2x12 I’m considering sticking an extra few cm’s on the depth and adding a plate amp but the question is which one? 
I’ve previously bought a complete new replacement plate amp for one of my EV ZLX PA tops but this has DSP etc so not really suitable. 
So I guess my question is “is there a simple plate amp module including power supply suitable to build into a bass cab”? 

DSP capability is a big bonus in my mind, what 's your objection to it?

Some potential candidates:

https://www.diyclassd.com/plate-amplifiers/

https://www.minidsp.com/products/plate-amplifiers