itu

Nearly whichever with a built-in X-over instead of a bland blend. I want my lowest bass to be plain bass. Higher end can be aff... effected. Especially the family of OD/fuzz/dist units. Most of the current ones sound funny instead of fuzzy.

I know, this happened five years ago, and I am on the same side of the topic... Blend is usually the first pot in the signal chain after the pickups in an active or a passive bass. Most of the basses have a hi-Z ("passive") mixing. There are only few exceptions, like Audere, EMG and John East. How do you see the difference with a mixer stage compared to the passive mixing? I put a Noll MixPot to my Modulus Graphite Quantum SPi and the active blend turned the sound different. I liked the result of the modification. Tone (treble & bass) was handled by bartolini, but it was - as most "activities" are - the only battery powered part of the circuitry. I think that the active mixing has not been talked so much. But it is a detail that serves our purpose in finding better sounds from our instruments.

Boney M had many ear cracking songs, Paul Simon's Diamonds on the soles of her shoes sounds always strange.

Artec is super cheap, but has only one channel and band. The written specs differ from actual. Yes, I have measured it. An age-old tce parametric pedal has two bands. Do not mix with Sustain+ that is semiparametric. Pricey, pretty rare. WMD Utility https://wmdevices.com/products/utility-parametric-eq lacks LPF, but has three bands. tce 1140 and 2240 are rack mounted but definitely effective units. Rane PEQ 55 has bands and knobs...

I am very aware of the theory and temperaments as well as scales. At the risk of being picky, we try to utilise mathematically correct tempered scale, but there aren't too many instruments that actually use it per se. The base is there, but the usage is not. The exactly tempered acoustic piano sounds ridiculously bad, and many stringed instruments are everything but tempered. I am sure you know Pythagorean comma et al. and you get my point. As a bassist my instrument is tuned slightly low. Not many cents, but still. My tuner (Peterson SAM) has this option.

@stewblack, could you please send few photos of the circuitry?

Actually not literally, but you are right because it is quite complicated source. It generates high voltages (up to hundreds of volts), but the internal impedance is so high (mega or even gigaohms), that the output is weak without decent buffering. The reason for this is that while the impedance is very high, a low impedance input (low compared to the piezo) would reduce and limit the frequency response. This is the reason the plain piezo tends to sound so thin. When the piezo output is buffered, any amp can handle the output and the sound becomes usable.

My Glockenklang Duo (2 x 10") is very good, but weighs a ton. Usually I take my alusonic (2 x 12") to gigs just because it is lighter. I use the Glockenklang Soul amp.

I am sorry, that my expression was unclear. I mean here that any passive component in the signal chain will affect the pickup response. It is not a question of quality or brand, it is the nature of the component. Changing a pot to another does not help. But if your preamp is a true active mixer (John East, Audere...), the blend or vol do not affect the signal and the pickup response.

Well written, this was the only thing I had to point out (and I do drift slightly away from the original topic). There are similarly many hues of green and red (yes, I have done some professional photography). We can usually compare two, because our relative senses can figure even tiny differences very accurately. But absolute measures are not so easy, because that is how our senses have evolved. Think about taste, angles... Absolute perfect pitch is not so common, but players usually have an absolute relative pitch. That is what I think is more important to have, because we usually play with others and we need to play together.

We learn the scales and the frequencies. A has been 415 Hz during Baroque, and now we are heading past the 440 Hz: many symphony bands are using up to 445 Hz as an A. There is no celestial mathematics behind Western music, just agreements. There are cultures that divide the octave to 24 or 32 notes. We use approximately equally tempered scale, while there are many others that sound better with certain instruments. If there was only one scale and tempering and A, perfect pitch could be something special, now we have people that have learned one specific system. Come on, Wolfgang had perfect pitch, although his A was around 415, not 440 Hz. The frequencies have been chosen, because our ears can hear certain frequencies better than others, namely 1 - 5 kHz. If the center frequency would be 3.36 Hz or 100 kHz, our ears would have been very different. Even basic quantities are chosen because they represent us. This kind of an article is quite some fun.

EMG BTS/BTC, bartolini, Aguilar, Delano, Seymour Duncan... What are you after? If you need a full mixer, consider EMG, Audere, and John East. Only EMG offers pickups, too. John East has passive circuitry in his system. If the blend and volume pots can affect the response of the pickups, any other system is just fine.

Have you been thinking that the electronics can be bypassed? Pretty easily, even without extra holes, just replace one pot with a DPDT switch. Then you can have both in one bass.

I do not find spending lots of money, two bags have been slightly used. Because of the quality, I would say they were practically new. The quality equals long term use, which means pretty small long term costs.

I use mono one and two bass versions. Good carrying straps, good pockets for tablet, spare strings, tools, cables etc. Newer versions have rings for mono fx case, the Tick 2.0. Useful detail, if a smaller pedalboard is enough.