Hey bass players... What's a good onboard treble and bass boost?

[Sensei Tim]

So I want something to add some more oomph to my bass and was thinking about adding an active treble and bass boost.  Any suggestions?

[rocket88]

i can make a few suggestions about what i've built that i like for a boost for bass. my top 3 in order.

1 - Catalinbread Sagrado Poblano Picoso: has a nice mid boost, and clean
2 - EHX Hogs Foot: socket the 2 100nF caps, cause one acts as a lp filter and the other boosts the lows and stock it's boomy, muffled, and overly bassy and that's coming from me who can never have enough low end. if you swap them out or remove them completely you get a real nice bass boost that's pretty transparent with just the right amount of increase in bass
3 - Rangemaster: either modify with a different input cap to increase bass, put caps parallel to the input cap to give a different amount of bass or treble, or put a pot to wipe between the values to give you different amount of bass. it's great and adds can add a bit of hair to your signal to boot.

[Sensei Tim]

I was actually thinking more along the lines of something like what ibanez or ebmm puts in their basses. What about the sadowsky preamp?

[rocket88]

ah, didn't realize you were looking more for a preamp then a boost. personally i'm not a fan of the ibanez or ebmm preamps. i've played a few sadowsky basses and the bass and preamp is pretty nice, haven't built the layout on site, but it seems like it should be able to fit in a bass with not much difficulty. you could also look at these in the contribution section. the fender one is similar to the bass preamp pedal rob (deadastronaut) makes and it's pretty nice.

but, if you're willing to spend some cash on a preamp i can't highly suggest the aguilar obp preamps. i've got an obp-3 in a bass i built and it's beyond amazing, but it's bass, treble, low-mids and high mids. i think the obp-1 and obp-2 is just bass and treble. they're like $120-130usd so not really that expensive, and freaking tiny. i wish the schematic was available for them to make a pedal. seriously great stuff.

[Beaker]

A lot will depend on how much room you have available under the scratchplate or control cavity.

What bass are you talking about here Tim? Does it have much room inside?

The Sadowsky has a great reputation, but I think that may be because it perfectly matches his instruments, which by all accounts are superb.

East preamps and Audere, as well as Zach's suggestion of Aguilar, are also highly rated. If you want to go budget, I believe Guitar Fetish do bass onboard preamps too.

Like Zach, I don't have anything positive to say about Ibanez or EB preamps.

I would stump up the cash and get the real deal, rather than try DIY in this case. When you see how neat and tidy some of these things are, with everything attached to the pots and control plate, then floating pieces of vero and a mess of wires, does not seem quite so attractive.

That's not to say it can't be done DIY, just that in cases like this, I would question if it's the best way to go.

Personally though, I just don't like active basses, but that's just me!

[Sensei Tim]

Thanks for the advice. I'll check out those preamps.

Right now I have 2 push/pull volune pots (series/parallel) and a master tone.  I was thinking of going to a master volume, treble and bass eq and then adding 2 mini toggles for the pickups to go series/parallel/coil tap and then a 3-way switch for pickup selection.   The control cavity is massive on this bass. I don't foresee a problem fitting all of this in there..