bass preamp help

im making a preamp for mu bass...im using a jass bass preamp design using opams...but i dnt intend to replace my existing passive pickups...so if i put my preamp after the passive pups will there be a problem???

I think as long as the input impedance to your preamp is high enough, it doesn't matter what it in front of it. You only run into trouble when you take something like a piezo and connect it to a low impedance input. Standard magnetic pickups should work fine over a wider range of impedances.

This almost hurt to read. Please don't wreck your bass with what you're calling a jazz bass pre-amp design. If, for whatever reasons your pickups aren't loud enough just change them. My favorite for a tele bass is adding a jazz pickup. Why have two basses, tele or jazz, when a pickup combination covers the same ground, but on the same guitar it allows more tonal choice?

The minute you start introducing new wiring to any existing successful design you are only diluting or rerouting the electrical signal, and when you play loud the guitar won't perform with the quality and variability you want. You have to be thinking about how fast those electrons are flowing and what the leading edge of the signal envelope looks like, or flows like. While electric guitar circuitry isn't as complicated as an electric shaver, it's very important to maintain the same path and speed to get the same performance.

You know defragmenting. When you start adding to existing circuitry you're doing the opposite of that. Instead of a strong leading current flow, you're diverting some signal strength and re-uniting it again. That's phasing your line voltage, ohmage, wattage, however you want to see it. That dilutes the leading edge of your signal envelope. While phasing is nice as an effect, you don't want to be doing that to your main guitar signal. You don't take an extra guitar cord and splice that into yours to do that outside your guitar, so why do it inside. Well, okay, it might be okay if you're only interested in recording yourself digitally for online where sound is so small and weak, and easy to tweak, but uh, yeah... I never... for sure I never got into it to where I was tweakin', at least not like you.

yeah... maybe the next time I'm under my waterfall, I'll build a government subsidized chute, sayin'it's for a salmon run, yeah... preserving the salmon like my Skeena river brothers... and half-phase my waterfall experience. With my luck I'll catch a twenty pounder with a lure I've never fished with, well, at least for underwater mammal procreativity.

as always, John Watt

Total horsecrap as usual.

Theres zero difference between having a preamp in the bass itself, on the floor as a box, or built into an amp. If its a quality preamp design that doesnt color the sound and has low distortion, all it does is step up the gain of normally weak jazz pickups. You could change the pups and get some gain increase but the tradeoff of more windings often hurts the tone.

If you want the same tone just louder, a built in preamp works fine if its shielded properly and doesnt introduce hum or noise. Also, so long as you dont overload the bass amp preamp section it should work fine. You wont have any actual increase in sound output from the amp but it may sound like its louder because the drive can give it an up front sound. With a very small gain set it can also work as a line driver that overcomes losses of the signal passing through a long cable and tha capacitence of that cable.

Where a built in bass preamp really shines is in recording. It lets you bypass a direct box or extrenal preamp and can allow you to match impediance recording direct. Bass is nearly always preamped when recorded direct, having it built in is just alot easier than having to plug into an external preamp.

just when you thought the bull$h!t had subsided...

Watt happened to the silence?!?!

Baloney as usual? Come on man, at least be real with it in terms of Harmony Central stats. Even if I'm not completely understood, at least my record-setting replies and views, even in DIY, are worthy of some sort of respect. That means I'm some kinda genoa salami, not baloney, okay?

If common sense electrical analysis isn't going over here, let me portray this impedence dilemma in air pressure terms. Let's say you got a race car with larger diameter and wider tires on the rear, for acceleration and braking traction, and smaller diameter and thinner tires up front to dig in for steering and have more solidity with higher air pressure. And this car is a proven winner, used by the cutting edge winners.

Now, you've got this guy sayin'he wants to boost the pressure in one of the front tires, thinking the more air he gets in the better it will work because he can't boost the back tires any more, like he wants to get finger poppin' on the strings and needs both heavy treble and bass response. But doin' that only makes the two front tires out of pressure balance, so that turning left has a different feel than turning right. So if you're adding another preamp, like you're pumping more air into the opposite tire to balance it, you're overloading the original design, pushing the parameters of tire construction, and making the front end more of a balance for the rear end, losing overall steering potential, like putting on lighter guage strings so it's easier to push them down, getting away from vibration potential.

But hey, not everybody wants to get into that race, get onstage, or play loud in a big room, so if it's just a matter of vanity electronics, or self-serving typing in a forum, go for it. I went for it, according to Fender and Gibson schematics when that's all there was, and it never came back to bite me. And I'll never apologize for sounding just like Jimi, or Duane, Carlos or Jeff on the same guitar. Now I'm sounding like me too. That's more than a rush, more like a constant feed from and into the atmosphere, all centered around my pickups, especially my lead pickup. But you don't have to care, or comprehend. Anything you want is all out there... and as Jimi said, beware, you are forewarned... he won't necessarily make you higher, but he can make your world wider.

Enhanced acoustics will always do just that. Dig out underneath your pickguard to find more volume, tone and sustain. We live in an acoustic world. Make it part of your music.

as always, John Watt

Quit being an embarrassment to everyone here and punking up stupid statements.

Hey hey hey... WRGKMC.... I thought we went through this thing before, to where I was putting up pictures of newspaper articles about me playing onstage and in bands, with lists of different union cards to illustrate my career, especially American Federation of Musicians.

Nowadays it only makes the negators and haters look bad insulting me, my integrity and forumite of the year eligibility even making me look more than good on the real Harmony Central even.

Even I've changed. Now I'm glad you're here to cover my rear. I'm too busy with leading edge innovations to get into the help me make a tele from parts and help me do cheap repairs on cheap guitars, something I wasn't into at all at any time anyway. When you leave behind art scholarships or bursaries to drop out of school to get a factory job and order a Marshall from England after seeing Jimi, getting the first Strat sold in my city too, with effects, you'd know what I mean.

I was even risking my life for sound experiments back then, riding my bicycle home with my wah, phase or flanger in hand when all those cars had huge pointy fenders, able to puncture a lung if I got off singing some have you ever been to electric ladyland to myself, trying to pump the wah and steer with one hand.

Uh, actually that hasn't changed. It might not be big finned cars out there with intent to wound, just maybe five way adjustable floating bridges, aluminum coned four inch mike stand cubes and all those animated lights floating around me onstage, if that is a stage, if I can stand still long enough to play... laser pointers in my eyes... it's getting rougher up there.

And just to show you how friendly I am, let me share some real concern with you, something about our health, and knowing guitarists, of course it's a sexual concern. I don't know about you, but up here in Canada cigarette packs have health warnings with pictures to illustrate cancer of the gums, rotten teeth, infected lungs, etc. Have you seen a condom with the warning and pictures too? No? I guess you don't roll it down that far.

as always, John Watt

Congradulations on being happily married. That's more of an accomplishment than playing anything on any guitar. New statistics from The States have women saying for the first time that they are looking at marriage as a life move more than a romantic love. That's not good from my perspective, and probably isn't the case for your musical self.

And despite playing through when Bowie hit, I didn't do those drugs and was still a non-smoker, non-drinking vegetarian, someone who had to explain to a few people every day that I didn't experiment with my sexuality. Too bad you're stuck in your DIY rut or you'd be getting into these timely and deeply concerned issues in other forums. But, then again, you don't need to.

Again, congradulations on a successful and loving life.

as always, John Watt

This coming from a guy who scalloped the neck on a brand new Fender bought 40 years ago, himself, with a carpenters hacksaw.

Enough said.

On your website you stated that after touring Ontario you went back to get your grade 12 diploma.

Last I heard they don't give scholarships to dropouts.

:bor

Good catch on his web of tangled lies and bull$h!t. funny isnt it.

I never scalloped the neck of any guitar I've ever owned. I used a hacksaw on my first Stratocaster, a '64 in 1970, to even out the horns for easier upper fret access.

I had a scholarship to The University of Toronto and a bursary for Sheridan College, hot when it first opened for graphic arts. I dropped out to get a job at The Atlas Steels and bought a Marshall ordered from England, the first Stratocaster ordered through Central Music, and lots of effects.

Being lured to Edmonton by a non-existant band, only to be over-dosed on L.S.D. by a drug dealer working for criminals in my home town, is why, after talking about this with my parents, I went back for grade twelve instead of working. I wasn't up to working, even if my artwork continued to be sold and I was doing the odd gig singing and playing my own songs with an acoustic.

It was fun back in grade twelve. I was asked to volunteer and be part of many clubs, lots of free resources. When I was asked to play in the pit band for "Hello Dolly", I used my Strat with a 100 watt head and one cabinet. I'd show up as soon as possible to play it loud in the huge auditorium. This got some of the show people and the director a little upset, seeing the attention and dancing I got going, but I was using aluminum foil from a cigarette pack, folding it a certain way and weaving it around the strings by the bridge to get a banjo sound, a big part of the show, so they put up with my Hendrix "hi-jinks".

as always, John Watt

This phrase explains everything.

...which justifies the fables you keep posting as actual real life events.