Ramblings From Justin Penney

Two weekends ago I broke the bridge on my upright bass. As I was moving it to the truck I smacked the bridge against the wall. It collapsed and broke into a couple of pieces.

While I was ordering a new bridge I went ahead and bought the fingerboard transducer and a preamp. The fingerboard transducer is a pickup that attaches to the back of the neck. This picks up all of the slapping and clicking noises. The preamp has two inputs, one for the normal pickup and one for the finger board pickup.

It took about two hours to fit the bridge. The bridge is huge and you cut and sand iut down to the size and shape that you need to fit the bass. This one also has adjusters so I can raise the action of the strings if I desire. As of right now I have the action a little high and the adjusters are all the way down. In the next few weeks I will be recutting the slots on the A, D, and G strings to lower them. The E is perfect. However, it is completely playable right now so I strung it up, installed the pickups and played for a half an hour.

What a difference! The bridge is so much better. My work on the bridge is also quite a bit better than my last bridge. I bought a needle file kit to cut the grooves. On my last bridge I only had a rat-tail file and the slots were too wide and deep. I have the slots pretty shallow right now but the strings sit solidly in their place. The pickup fits much better in this bridge. The pickup I have (K&K) mounts in the wing of the bridge. The gap in the wing of my old bridge was huge and I had to use shims to get the pickup to fit. The gap in the new bridge was a little small so I was able to sand it to fit. It slides in perfectly and sounds 20 times better than in the old bridge.

As of now I am really happy with the sound. The fingerboard pickup adds all of the little clicky sounds that I was craving without making the body of the sound anemic or harsh. I can easily get a deep bass sound with lots of really high clicking or I can dial the fingerboard pickup down and smooth it out but keep some of the definition of the string and finger noises that make and acoustic instrument sound human.

# posted by Justin @ 10:33 PM