Category: Tips and tricks

Rosin ages as it dries out. To keep it pliable, you need to ensure it has enough moisture—which isn’t so easy, because if rosin absorbs too much moisture, it becomes “mushy.”

Smokers face the same problem with tobacco. For cigars, small pouches containing a gel-like substance are available to help regulate humidity. Products like the “Rosin Saver” also use these pouches.

Small clay discs are more sustainable (because they can be reused). Soak them in water for a few minutes until they are fully saturated. Then remove them, pat them dry, and place them in a screw-top jar along with the rosin (a jar of horseradish paste, for example, is a good size).

Pickups that are mounted under the bridge foot are quite easy to try out quickly on your own bass. It is more difficult to try out pickups for which the bridge has been modified or where the pickup has to be adapted to the bridge. In order to give our customers an impression of the sound character of these pickups, we have mounted them all on one bass. We also made recordings with this bass – that was in 2011, so it’s been a while, but in principle the recordings are still up to date. That’s why they get their own blog post here on our new website.

The pickup signals went directly into the mixing console (sometimes with a Lehle Sunday Driver XLR connected upstream for impedance matching). No tone control or effects, just the dry pickup sound. For a CD recording, the sound would certainly have been further optimized and the respective characteristics of the pickups would have been taken into account with adapted EQ settings – I deliberately refrained from doing this here. The pickups certainly sound different on stage: The amp and speakers color the sound, and of course the room acoustics also play a role. These recordings therefore do not reflect how a pickup sounds when amplified by an amp on stage.

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