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The pickup test bass

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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Vacuum pads or gaffa tape

At a gig, a customer was embarrassed to have to use his smartphone as a cheat sheet. However, the gaffa tape used for this left some ugly craters in the varnish of the bass when it was removed.
Reusable adhesive pads, such as those offered for mounting things on car dashbioards, are less dangerous for the varnish of a double bass. These adhesive pads do not use glue, but a vacuum, and therefore leave no adhesive residue on the bass. Depending on the condition of the varnish, they are certainly not completely safe, but my tests on various instruments did not reveal any problems when removing these pads.

Manufacturer Fischer offers such vacuum pads with Velcro backing. The specified adhesive force per set is 5 kg.