Passinwind
Well-known member
Backstory here: https://www.talkbass.com/wiki/pw3b-lpf-open-source-onboard-preamp/
The Wiki could use some love, it's been a few years since I've done anything with it. There have been a few false starts with new versions and most of what I'm going to post here are various new iterations that only myself and a few beta testers have built up. The long Talkbass thread has a zillion swerves in it, but at least two or three commercial makers have spun off their own onboard preamps using some of the information there to get a leg up. But far more people have built pedal versions for themselves, and I'd love to spin off a more feature rich design fork here. These things already work especially well with amplified acoustic guitar and mandolin and that direction is probably going to be my primary focus for a while. But, open source...you tell me!
So, throw the onboard preamp in a test box and print a label on the home inkjet:
That box has served as a demo unit for several years and I actually just took it back as a trade in from the mandolin player who hosts a cool weekly jam I play half a mile from here.
Put one in a $$$ bass for NAMM 2017, but it was a last minute half ass install (by the luthier) and the bass itself was a bit duff unfortunately. The same year we brought along two in pedals with enclosures from Pedal Parts Plus:
But the booth slaves never really figured out how to drive them and although one online bass oriented magazine did a YouTube feature on it I was still the only one contributing much to improvements. The lack of available dual gang reverse log taper pots suitable for back routed basses was an ongoing hassle, and the linear ones we were all using gave a fairly limited useful frequency sweep range. But eventually I discovered that Omeg would happily make as few as ten units for easy money in a month's time. Great, I ordered a dozen and they work exactly as expected. While they were being built I noticed that Tayda had started stocking some cheap Alpha ones, so for pedals it was now game on, finally. So grabbed a free Adobe Illustrator demo and came up with a quick and dirty trial box from Tayda:
Meh, I can certainly do better, but for whatever reason my next go with a newer AI trial version just didn't quite work out. Tayda really needs to offer digital proofs before printing, IMNSHO. And there's no reason at all to push AI as the exclusive solution for UV print file generation, although I've run into this with much more uptown outfits as well. But I'll cop to not doing a good enough job, and Tayda is obviously doing a whole lot of things right. So I'm just sending one of the "not quite right" mandolin beta test boxes out to my brother for testing during his busy gig season this week, calling it B stock:
I do think that wood knobs on the copper hammertone finish are kind of a cool look, and these walnut ones came to me as unfinished test units for an Etsy vendor called Pick Knobs, who are a joy to work with. He loves doing custom work and the sky is pretty much the limit for inlays, weird shapes, and so on.
And then on this very forum I saw some posts about Amplifyfun, who are about an hour's drive from me and seemed perfect for my particular wants and needs. They'll accept various file formats, give great feedback along with the digital proofs, cost essentially the same as Tayda, and for me economy shipping takes one of two days to arrive. And if I use LMS for enclosures that only takes a day to get to Amplifyfun since they're both in Portland. These two were my trial runs over the last few weeks, using Gorva S90s with the premium sparkle finishes:
The bottom one is the color shifting "chameleon" finish, which goes purple under the right lighting conditions. Pics don't really do justice, it's killer.
OK, enough for chapter one of this book!
The Wiki could use some love, it's been a few years since I've done anything with it. There have been a few false starts with new versions and most of what I'm going to post here are various new iterations that only myself and a few beta testers have built up. The long Talkbass thread has a zillion swerves in it, but at least two or three commercial makers have spun off their own onboard preamps using some of the information there to get a leg up. But far more people have built pedal versions for themselves, and I'd love to spin off a more feature rich design fork here. These things already work especially well with amplified acoustic guitar and mandolin and that direction is probably going to be my primary focus for a while. But, open source...you tell me!
So, throw the onboard preamp in a test box and print a label on the home inkjet:
That box has served as a demo unit for several years and I actually just took it back as a trade in from the mandolin player who hosts a cool weekly jam I play half a mile from here.
Put one in a $$$ bass for NAMM 2017, but it was a last minute half ass install (by the luthier) and the bass itself was a bit duff unfortunately. The same year we brought along two in pedals with enclosures from Pedal Parts Plus:
But the booth slaves never really figured out how to drive them and although one online bass oriented magazine did a YouTube feature on it I was still the only one contributing much to improvements. The lack of available dual gang reverse log taper pots suitable for back routed basses was an ongoing hassle, and the linear ones we were all using gave a fairly limited useful frequency sweep range. But eventually I discovered that Omeg would happily make as few as ten units for easy money in a month's time. Great, I ordered a dozen and they work exactly as expected. While they were being built I noticed that Tayda had started stocking some cheap Alpha ones, so for pedals it was now game on, finally. So grabbed a free Adobe Illustrator demo and came up with a quick and dirty trial box from Tayda:
Meh, I can certainly do better, but for whatever reason my next go with a newer AI trial version just didn't quite work out. Tayda really needs to offer digital proofs before printing, IMNSHO. And there's no reason at all to push AI as the exclusive solution for UV print file generation, although I've run into this with much more uptown outfits as well. But I'll cop to not doing a good enough job, and Tayda is obviously doing a whole lot of things right. So I'm just sending one of the "not quite right" mandolin beta test boxes out to my brother for testing during his busy gig season this week, calling it B stock:
I do think that wood knobs on the copper hammertone finish are kind of a cool look, and these walnut ones came to me as unfinished test units for an Etsy vendor called Pick Knobs, who are a joy to work with. He loves doing custom work and the sky is pretty much the limit for inlays, weird shapes, and so on.
And then on this very forum I saw some posts about Amplifyfun, who are about an hour's drive from me and seemed perfect for my particular wants and needs. They'll accept various file formats, give great feedback along with the digital proofs, cost essentially the same as Tayda, and for me economy shipping takes one of two days to arrive. And if I use LMS for enclosures that only takes a day to get to Amplifyfun since they're both in Portland. These two were my trial runs over the last few weeks, using Gorva S90s with the premium sparkle finishes:
The bottom one is the color shifting "chameleon" finish, which goes purple under the right lighting conditions. Pics don't really do justice, it's killer.
OK, enough for chapter one of this book!
Last edited:
