Putting a Bass into a system

[andytwatson]

Our church is going to be moving into a school in the fall. I am the worship leader and in charge of putting together a new PA. We will be micing the guitar amp off to the side of the stage. I would preferably not have a bass amp on stage to try and lower stage volume. What do you guys recommend for getting the bass into the PA.

There is the line 6 bass POD, the aphex bass aural exciter DI box, and the pricey Avalon U5 preamp. The avalon may be too much money for us right now. What do you guys think about these approaches. are there any others? ANy advice would be much appreciated. thanks guys

[Brian Scherzer]

Another possibility would be the Sadowsky preamp/DI. With any of the choices, make sure that the bass player can hear himself in the monitors.

[landru64]

i play in a church all the time with a sadowsky preamp (that i donated). it made the sansamp bass DI sound like it was broken. maybe it was... anyway, it's really all you need. there are countless other very serious cats that come thru that church to play and it works fine for all of them. there are other things, but that is what i would recommend. the rest is up to the right hand of the player :)

[PB+J]

I'm a bass player primarily.

The simplest thing would be a passive solid state DI--the radial JDI sounds great and is built like a tank. It sells for around $180. It's a first class professional box that will deliver an uncolored, clean, high quality signal and never fail. http://www.radialeng.com/di-jdi.htm

There are cheaper passive DIs as well, like the whirlwind or the countryman. They'd work too

The downside for the bass player would be no tone shaping ability--a passive DI, a good one, gives you a great flat signal. The bass player would be limited to whatever tone shaping he has on board, which might be fine--I rarely use eq anyway, lots of bassists will have onboard preamps.

Active DI's are sort of a cross between a DI and a preamp. They come in simple versions, with limited tone controls or none at all, and in fancier versions with all sorts of tone shaping.

I've used an Avalon U5 (an active DI) for years and it's a great sounding box, with some tone shaping ability--I use it as a DI and as a preamp into a stage amp. It's pricey, but it will sound absolutely great with everything you put into it, and it has a few tone presets that will cover most everything you would want.

There are a lot of "preamps with DI's" out there--the sadowsky preamp, the sans amp; Radial makes the "bassbone" which is two preamps and a DI, useful for someone switching instruments a lot. http://www.tonebone.com/tb-bassbone.htm

If I were you I would go with a simple passive DI--it needs no external power, gives you an uncluttered stage, and more important you get total control of the sound from the board. The more bells and whistles you give the bass player, the more he will be trying to change the sound that you, in the audience at the board, are hearing. The bass player might not like it, but the overall band sound will be better if you just go bass/passive di/board

[doc]

Before you settle on the DI only approach, be sure that your PA is able to reproduce bass frequency with a little bit of authority. A lot of small to midsize PA setups aren't equipped to do that. You might be better off with a smallish amp with a line out - you can always put something in front of it to hide it from the audience.