Making my Starfire I a Starfire II

SFIV1967

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And it looks like you got the strings alinged perfectly over the polepieces!

Ralf
 

edwin

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I don't know if you want to go there, but if you buffer the pickups before blending them, a lot of the issues with loading (and weird comb filtering) can go away. I'm a big fan of an active blend.
 

edwin

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What is buffering?
Putting a preamp right after the pickups. Back in the day Phil Lesh had preamps built right on the bottom of the BiSonic pickups themselves, affectionally known as "spider sex" preamps.

A buffer is essentially a preamp without gain that electronically separates the pickup from all of the following passive parts. Because a pickup is a coil and pot is a (variable) resistor, adjusting the volume on a passive bass can change the tone when the volume is changed. Add a second pickup and the whole thing becomes an interactive circuit where the sound changes with the volume pots (or blend pot, if you have one in there). Add in a cable and the resistance and capacitance of the cable adds its own flavor. With a buffer, the tone of the pickup remains constant. Some people think that's a good thing and others like the passive sound. Personally, just about all my basses have buffers (aka active electronics), mostly with active blends, which is simply placing the buffers or preamps before the blend pots (which requires two preamps).

Some basses combine the pickups prior to the preamp and if there are pots involved, you lose the benefit of an active buffer, so the pickups still interact with each other.
 
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Nuuska

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I don't know if you want to go there, but if you buffer the pickups before blending them, a lot of the issues with loading (and weird comb filtering) can go away. I'm a big fan of an active blend.

You are correct about loading issues - but not w comb filter effects. They are caused by the fact that two pups are involved.
 

edwin

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You are correct about loading issues - but not w comb filter effects. They are caused by the fact that two pups are involved.
That seems like it would be the case, but I've had the weird sound when the passive blend pot is dead center go away when switching to an active blend. I was addressing the earlier post and using that terminology, so perhaps comb filter is the wrong description.
 

Nuuska

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W passive blend you enter the complex total impedance, that both pups see - like you described - and there could well be resonating frequencies here and there - and they vary, when you tweak the knobs - any of them.
 

Happy Face

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Amazing commentary. Wow.

It's a great reminder. I'm about to dive back into synth world for a little while. The warming is "don't get obsessed with finding that perfect sound. Just finish the damn song.
 

lungimsam

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I have 4 usable tones now with my blend knob x 16 Tonestyler settings each. But I still like true bypass on the neck pup best.
 

edwin

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I have 4 usable tones now with my blend knob x 16 Tonestyler settings each. But I still like true bypass on the neck pup best.
Thank you for sharing your journey with this bass!
 

lungimsam

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Update:
So initially I thought the RWRP of the neck pup didn't really do anything. But I was in a noisy environment the other day and with my V/blend/tonestyler harness, when the blend knob was in the middle detent, the noise went away. When slowly rolled away from the detent (in either direction), the noise started coming back. So if that is how a RWRP wound pup is supposed to behave with a regular wound bridge pup (and I think it is supposed to do that), then yes, the current NS RWRP neck Bisonic works with a NS Starfire I standard wound bridge pup.
However , I never use the center position anyway and the noise was minimal anyway so all good. But I thought I would report back about the RWRP NS neck pup currently offered.
 

mellowgerman

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Then that is indeed an RWRP set you have there! The single-coil 60-cycle hum that is bucked in a humbucking configuration only shows up when the pickups are unbalanced AND you are not facing in the magic direction of silence. That is to say, any single coil pickup with 60-cycle hum, does not exhibit said hum when you are faced in the right directly while playing. Of the 360 degrees around a standing human instrumentalist, the magic silent direction is probably about a 10 degree sliver... which I believe has to do with power sources in your immediate surroundings. Hope that makes sense!
 

mgod

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Putting a preamp right after the pickups. Back in the day Phil Lesh had preamps built right on the bottom of the BiSonic pickups themselves, affectionally known as "spider sex" preamps.
Phil didn't have buffers (although the output may have been buffered). He had Darlington Emitter Followers, which had the function of lowering the output impedance.
 

edwin

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Phil didn't have buffers (although the output may have been buffered). He had Darlington Emitter Followers, which had the function of lowering the output impedance.
I think we're arguing semantics here. Any active circuitry between a pickup and the signal destination will perform the function of a buffer, including one built with Darlington emitter followers (essentially a unity gain buffer using a pair of transistors acting as one big transistor). Rick went so far as to call it a preamp in a discussion about the circuitry added to Phil's Starfire.

A reply to a post at rukind:
"I don't think you quite get how hand made the original BiSonic mounted preamps were. There wasn't even a perfboard layout. It was transistors soldered directly to resistors soldered directly to capacitors! It looked like spider group sex. This was components directly soldered to one another with a terminal here or there mounted on the plastic bobbin assemblies of the pickups. Worked great."

I wasn't able to find the exact interview with Rick, but he talked about how even a foot of wire affected the high end so they wanted to buffer the pickup as close to it as they could. It doesn't get closer than right on the pickup.
 
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