Passinwind

17 hours ago, funkle said:

The preamp

 

Right, here we go.

 

Although the 'Pro' series had what might be considered a more conventional preamp, I really cannot see making a Wal-alike without having a 'filter based' preamp. Bit of a misnomer as all preamps filter the sound, but it's the convention we have when talking about these instruments, so I'll stick to it. 

 

That decision made, this really only leaves a few choices. 

 

1. @Passinwind has an open source hybrid filter pre which people can build. I lack the skills to do so, so have not. https://www.talkbass.com/threads/the-passinwind-open-source-preamp.1259692/

 

2. Lusithand Devices (https://www.facebook.com/Lusithand/) have a filter based preamp to accommodate conventional one pickup or two pickup setups. These are the Single or Dual NFP preamps. They also make the 'Special' version of these, which is the only commercially available preamp I know of which can do the buffering necessary to accommodate 'New Way' or 'humbucker set per single string' wiring, with all of the resulting outputs. The controls are straightforward and even simpler than a typical Wal and it looks well made. If I decide to go with pickups that match the Mark 2/3 rather than the Pro, I would buy one of these, the 'Dual Special NFP'. However I ended up with...

 

3. AC Guitars - the venerable ACG EQ01. https://www.acguitars.co.uk/acg-eq01-filter-pre-amp/. This is well known, has been through several iterations (most recently reducing the range of frequencies that can be selected, I think), is made by John East, and has a lot of flexibility built into it, perhaps too much. Being able to adjust the amount of resonant frequency dialled in as well as the frequency the LPF is set at is going to be a lot of knob twiddling for sure. It also has an entirely separate HPF section (for whichever pickup is set as the 'treble' pickup'). It may be difficult to easily replicate sounds when the knobs have no markings, something I will have to address. It happened to be the preamp I got a hold of first, and having this more or less decided what kind of pickup design I would go for, because I sure cannot buffer 4 outputs per pickup individually with this preamp. 

 

None of these clone a Wal. But the last two I would expect to put me in the ball park. 
  

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.

6 hours ago, Chienmortbb said:

Just had a delivery from Thomann, new bass plus all the XLR and SpeakOn connectors. Decision time. Do I do a rough up of the back panel using the existing back panel so I can start on the wiring or wait for the delivery from Quick Panel?

Never mind that, how's the bass John?

12 minutes ago, nekomatic said:

I checked their T&C's and you're not supposed to use the DXF for getting the panel made elsewhere. I'm not sure how they'd know though…

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?  😉

4 hours ago, Chienmortbb said:

Yes I bought my case about 6 months ago from Modushop.

The panel shown above has been orderd from Quickpanel. I have not yet had an ETA but don't expect a really fast turnaround as they re-anodise the panel after machining. Of course the power amp modules are still in China so there is no rush. The cost for that panel including shipping is just over £36. To use anyone else that I have found would have cost over £60.

 

Hifi2000/Modushop now offer a similar service and may be faster however the advantage of Quickpanel and a few others is that they have the software.

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

6 hours ago, TimR said:

What do you do?

 

Join in the fun using your wealth of background theory knowledge and years of experience to instantly craft an interesting line that has groove and entertains resulting in whistles and cheering from the adoring crowd.

 

Or something else?

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.

22 minutes ago, Chienmortbb said:

The case was originally intended for a new bass amp but that is on hold. The good thing about it is that the sides are chunky aluminium extrusions. As you can see from the picture this maes a nice 230 X 80 mm heatsink. Ideally the fins would be vertical but you can't have everything. AS the font and back panel are also aluminium (3mm thick) this is a fair amount of passive heatsinking for class D amps. I have a nice 80mm fan that I can install if needed. The weight is 1.9Kg, not lightweight but solid. Incidently I have not designed the front panel yet. The rear panel was designed in Quickpanel (www.quickpanel.sk) and has been ordered. I know from experience that DIY  panel look homemade so I bit the bullet.

 

 

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.

On 06/11/2021 at 12:34, danweb22 said:

Around 10lbs I think 

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

On 08/11/2021 at 01:25, Al Krow said:

 

Fyi - my actual question to Max was:

 

"Quick query. I believe the Thumpinator cuts below 28 Hz. Am I correct that it is - 24dB/octave or is it operating at just -12dB/octave?"

 

So it's fair to deduce that his response was implying it was a 24dB/oct cut which would also tie in with the effectiveness at preventing speaker excursion shown in Phil's charts above (although I guess could possibly have been e.g. 18dB/Oct etc. although that would less likely in terms of components?)

Not sure why he was being so coy, though - if it does cut at 24dB/oct that's very welcome given its purpose!

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.😉

On 05/11/2021 at 15:46, Jonesy said:

There's a few topics over on TB about him, his gear and setup etc, but there doesn't seem to be much over here. I was just wondering if anyone has played any slide bass or setup a 2 string bass?

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.

On 28/09/2021 at 09:23, bloke_zero said:

Cool! So it's set and forget?

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.

On 21/09/2021 at 11:49, Passinwind said:

 

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.

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.

20 hours ago, nilebodgers said:

Interesting. How did you get round the Saturation pot needing different value gangs (10k and 1k reverse log)? Did you find spares of the original part?

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. 😉

1 hour ago, Stub Mandrel said:

I am still using the one I made.

 

 

I'm not convinced there's any great value shifting the frequency up above 30Hz, unless you are using a speaker that can't handle frequencies above that. The potentially damaging transients are sub-sonic.

 

Seems to work best after compressor but before octaver. Gives me the confidence to use a fair amount of sub-octave without worrying an open-E will destroy something! Also didn't seem to harm a 5-string with low B at concert volumes.

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.

On 14/09/2021 at 02:06, neepheid said:

 

There would be no such void.  They would have used something else, it probably would have sounded bassy and we would be having this conversation about something else as we wouldn't have known anything different.  A parallel universe where Gibson got there first?  Sign me up, there might not have been a 9/11 or Covid either 

 

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! 😉

On 28/08/2021 at 07:15, shoulderpet said:

Brought an Ibanez Mezzo bass during lockdown and modded it a fair bit (Seymour Duncan SPB-2 and series/parallel switch for the P pickup and gone fully passive), love that bass however....

 

Today I went to the local music store to get some strings, whilst I was there I thought I would try some basses so I asked if I could play some of the Thunderbird basses.

 

First bass I tried was an Ltd Thunderbird, plugged it in started playing and tonally I was floored, it was like the tone I hear in my head, unlike my P/J basses both pickups on full sounded fat and punchy and full rather than the tone getting thinner, everything that irks me about P/J basses was completely absent.

Plugged in the 2nd Thunderbird bass and same thing.

 

I brought the strings I went there for and walked out stunned and as much as I love the Mezzo bass I walked out feeling regret that when I brought my last bass I brought a P/J and not an Epiphone Thunderbird instead

Anyone has a similar experience?

Nope, my main bass was a gift. 😉

16 hours ago, wateroftyne said:

I dunno.. live, maybe.

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.

2 hours ago, Chienmortbb said:

Its Ok for you, we did not have gold stars at our school. This is the first time I have got a gold star.

You can have my Participation Trophy too if you fancy it, freight collect. 😎

On 21/07/2021 at 08:51, TheGreek said:

 if you don't vote then your opinion counts for nothing

 

Same as if I do vote, where's a bigger carrot? 😎

On 23/07/2021 at 09:00, Inara said:

Lol, frets will still only consume maybe 5% of my attention 😉

Same here actually. If you happen to make your way to the upcoming Seattle GTG please introduce yourself to the old bald guy that is Passinwind...oh, wait!

On 12/07/2021 at 00:14, itu said:

One special parametric, there are not many with this many bands. One to four bands is far more common, this has to be extremely powerful.

I owned four of them at one time, they were about the best thing going for monitor EQ for many many years. All four are still in the monitor rack of the club I used to mix in, going strong several days a week a good 15+ years later. The first one lived in my bass guitar rack for quite a while before that and was great for that purpose.

On 20/07/2021 at 23:57, Merton said:

Interesting that he’s said 1200W and I was told by Peavey last week that it was 1100W. 1200 makes more sense given the name.

*of course 1200W class D probably means it’ll “feel” like around 600W class AB. In my very humble, fully educated and intelligent opinion 😜

Peavey quoted 1100 watts at 1% THD+ noise, it's entirely possible that it makes 1200 watts at some higher but still usable distortion figure.

Play feel is a whole other thing, not all of like the feel of "all" AB amps unreservedly. 😎

Frets? Ewww...☣️☣️☣️

😎

Today I rebuilt this four year old preamp with all the appropriate new innards I've been working on, including the board in the last post before this one.:

It's working better than expected, if anything.