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Can I plug my bass straight into my PA or do I need a DI box?


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I have heard both yes and no answers to this question. I have a Behringer UB2222FX Pro mixer which has both balanced & unbalanced inputs. This weekend we will plug that into a Peavey powered mixer into 2 JBL mains and a Behringer B300 Monitor. (Note: this is a mix of my PA and another guy's).

 

I tried plugging my bass straight into my mixer and it sounds fine except for a little distortion out the headphones and out the B300. I haven't yet tried with the powered mixer and JBLs. I don't mind a little distortion. I just don't want to hurt any gear. If I should use a DI box...which do you recommend? Thanks!

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If there's enough gain in the channel's preamp, it will work ok.

 

It may not sound great due to possible mis-matching of impedanced between the bass and the mixer's input. Generally, mixer's input impedances are too low to get the best sound from your bass if you have passive pickups.

 

You won't damage anything though.

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My humble opinion is that you would probably benefit from using "some" sort of preamp. An actual DI box would perhaps be best.. but maybe there is some other way that you can do it with the stuff that you have?

 

The guy I am playing with has bought a DI, but before that he was running through an old digital delay unit that I had, which we set with very little of the effect, but still we were able to boost his signal somewhat, and it seemed to sound "fuller" running into the fairly low end PA that we were using.

 

As it is said..just my .02 worth.

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Would any of these guitar pedals work as a line booster for my bass to go into the mixer of my PA system?

 

Guyatone WR3 Envelope Filter

Nobels ODR1 Overdrive

Boss TU2 Tuner

Ibanez DS-7 Distortion

Ibanez PH-7 Phaser

Arion SAD Analog Delay

Akai Headrush Looper/Delay

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