I’m a bassist and synth lover starting up a project building a bass guitar with a unique touch.
That ‘touch’ is this idea I have of building a bass with two pick ups and each pick up having its own dedicated low pass filter. The Moog lowpass filter is by far my first choice, but that’s only theory of course! First off I would have to get my hands on two Moog filters and I don’t know how to come about them. Does Moog sell parts individually? Theory is one thing, but I don’t know if this idea of mine is even workeable. I’m capable enough to solder and put this thing together electronically, but what do you guys think about this project?
If you have a config like a P&J style pickup (or P/P, J/J,) just wire P to a jack, wire J to a jack, and send each to a 101.
It would probably be more practical to just have individual outputs on the bass per pickup, and you could run each pickup to wherever or whatever effect you wanted.
You could get pretty creative with this, sending the outputs to a board, panning them hard R/L, sending one output to an effect and the other to another…sounds interesting to me.
I use a CP251 sometimes to multiply my signal before routing it elsewhere.
It will cost you at least 450 bucks for two 101’s from novamusik.com.
This sounds like a fun project! I think erick’s idea would be best, fitting two lowpass filters into a bass body would be pretty tricky. Unless youre using a gibson es bass body. If youre using P pickups you can get really crazy and spilt each pickup to two lowpass filters
Just kidding but I’m picking up a CHEAP Squire bass to do the very same thing. Planning on gutting and trimming a MF101 and will be taking the body of a Squire Jaguar SS (Short Scale) to my drill press to forester a fair portion of the upper part of the body to make room). I am only planning on doing a single Low Pass (it has P+J) and I will place it inline as if it was directly plugged in.
My biggest concern at the moment is power. The typical 9V that you see in most active electronic guitars, I think, won’t go very far. MF’s need 300mA or at leas, the PS is rated at such. If you use mini pots and forego complexity of LEDs, you’ll only save a bit, I think the DRIVE function is the biggest consumer outside of running the basic circuit.
If you are interested in this particular Bass (you said cheap!), Fender has a $25 instant rebate at the moment which means you can get it at a tax free state like Delaware for about $145. Replace the tuners with stock Fender and you’ve got something reasonable (at least so I’ve heard).
And it’s made in Indonesia, not China! Will see if I can scrape together enough gusto to execute. Keep us informed if you do move fwd.
Actually Alembic basses work this way - there are a variety of electronics packages, but the flagship line, the Series I & II, have each pickup wired separately, and each with its own lowpass filter. The Signature & Anniversary electronics packages are similar, with separate filters for each pickup. Some of the other packages don’t have stereo as an option (actually, neither does signature), with only one filter for both pickups.
You might be interested to check out the Alembic SF-2 Bass Superfilter - two filters that can each be run as lowpass, bandpass, or highpass, and can be run either mono or stereo.
On re-reading the original post, I see that you see this as being somewhat synth-like - do you just want the filters or do you want envelope and CV control as well? The Alembic system isn’t particularly synth oriented, it’s more of a way to organically manipulate the sound of the bass & pickups.
You won’t need 300ma to drive a basic discrete ladder filter.
More like 25-75ma.
But you’ll need two batteries, one for positive and one for negative voltages.
I once gutted some brand new Jim Dunlop Crybaby wahs and installed Moog filters in them.
I used CMS discrete modules, 2 batteries and added three controls to the side of each pedal: Freq, pedal depth, resonance.
(even sold one to film composer Mark Isham for his trumpet.)
But you could probably take two Doepfer ladder filters, take out the boards and mount them inside a body cavity.
Wouldn’t cost that much.
You’d want hot pickups or some changes to the filters for the lower input signals too.
Otherwise you might get some really noisy filters.
H’s basses are awesome (he invited me over when I was visiting the west coast last month) and the Doepfer modules sure are cost effective but two problems:
The modules do not have Env follower circuit so for me, wouldn’t have the desired effect; but more importantly, I couldn’t don the Moog guitar strap unless it had genuine ‘Moog Inside’.
I planned on installing a compressor circuit prior to the LP because my current setup (passive weak pups to Carl Martin compressor limiter to MF101) works well. Again could pose a power problem, I’m much better at coding assembler than I am at circuit design but I can take things apart (and sometimes even put them back together!)
[On re-reading the original post, I see that you see this as being somewhat synth-like - do you just want the filters or do you want envelope and CV control as well? The Alembic system isn’t particularly synth oriented, it’s more of a way to organically manipulate the sound of the bass & pickups.[/quote]
I’d just install a lowpass filter per humbucker, no envelope or other tricks which are better done outboard I think. But some posts here have made me wondering about the power I need to drive the filters. My idea was to make this bass all passive, meaning without batteries and preamp. But is that even possible if I need ‘power’ to drive the two filters?
