Stereo bass and effects

[bonkdav]

Hey there,  I just put a third pickup in my fender jazz bass way up against the neck. (its also an 8 string now    )  I wired the new pickup in place of the old "neck" pickup so now the old "neck" pickup is the middle pickup.  I put a stereo jack in and wired the middle pickup straight to the middle contact point.  so if I use a mono cable it will just short the middle pickup to ground, and Ill have a mono signal. of the new pickup and bridge pickup. Im hoping that this will allow me to use my new pickup and the old bridge pickup with the stock tone controls and Ill have a stereo cable and box to plug the sucker into for the middle pickup so ill have tone controls and maybe a phase switch and a circuit that allows me to split and send to two amps or blend them back together so I can have clean plus distortion etc. 

Does anyone see any problems with my plan?  Im just kinda winging this and Im not very experienced so I may have overlooked something.  Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Davis

[sean k]

I reckon getting a slow gear together and having it on the new neck pickup then putting that signal and the higher ones, or the more harmonically rich ones, into a ducker with the slow gear as key. That way the harmonics will ring out initially then th slow gear will get a strong enough signal together to duck the original out and the thuddy bass will appear... that'd be cool. I personally wouldn't bother with two amps but work with two FX chains and do as much as you can with mixing up the two signals to create one signal with a difference.

As for whether it'll work. I'm sure you've thought it out so why shouldn't it?

[Taylor]

I've had a stereo bass rig and learned this: do not use 2 speakers that can both reproduce bass frequencies. Use one speaker that does full range and use a second speaker that reproduces maybe 150hz and up. The reason is that you will get lots of bass cancellation if you place 2 full range speakers more than maybe 2 feet apart - and if you're placing them within 2 feet of each other, you lose the stereo image effect, so there's no point.

Ultimately I decided the 2 amps thing wasn't as fun as I imagined. If you just want to mix clean and fuzz, etc., I'd look into building a mixer.

[bonkdav]

Ok.  Im probably gonna hold off on the stereo business for a while and leave that to the guitar player and trumpets.  I have a peavey cab with 2 tens and an 18 that is bi-ampable so i may end up separating the tens for the middle pickup.  (that cab plus my bassman head is great for not turning chords into poop,but boy is it heavy)  for now Ill probably just mix and blend a bunch of different business and see what i get.  I really like the slow gear idea, so thats going on the "to build" list.  I just got done modding a blues driver to let a bunch of bass through and i really like it, but I think itll be magic when blended.  It may even replace my tube screamer I built for bass.  I also just got done with a boss bf-2 flanger, that I modded the delay time on (30pf) and it sounds so much better than it used to; its not metallic sounding anymore, but Im definately interested to blend that for some slight flange.

Is there anyone who has had good luck with stereo bass? and if so can you share your secrets?

[Taylor]

There aren't many bass players here, and few bass players do the stereo thing, so I doubt you're going to find anyone but me around here that's done it. If you really want to investigate it, check out Talkbass.com. But they'll tell you the same thing I did: use a full-range speaker for one side, and a satellite that only does mids and highs for the other side. Low frequencies are not directional anyway, so the stereo imaging doesn't do anything for lows. Other than that, you should be good, though I don't know how jazzed you'll actually be about it once you make it happen. And especially when you have to take the whole setup to a gig...

Have fun.