Quote:
Originally Posted by michael76
The Tak's preamp is Cool Tube 1 and I saw that Takamine suggests this SBP as an Aux input so I was wondering if it does anything to the sound. I thought maybe it would be better to fix the sound at the source than a pedal.
https://www.takamine.com/soundboard-transducer |
From what I can tell from this drawing, the palathetic pickup is placed right under the saddle, which is the usual place to attach a soundboard pickup. On the plus side, there appears to be plenty of room to attach the soundboard transducer on the other side of the bridgepins. I'd get a Schatten Design HFN or an Open To Source Sensor #27 and install it parallel to the bridge pins on the other side of the bridgeplate. You'll definitely want to get one of those two products as they allow for temporary installations (with tape or putty) which can be moved and experimented with. It would be possible, for instance, to attach the SBT so that its signal is out of phase with the palathetic pickup and the positioning would need to be reversed to get a good blend of signals (presuming you wanted to blend, as opposed to just using the SBT by itself).
Taking a look at the Cool Tube preamp manual, I see that they specify a "medium impedance soundboard pickup" and that there's a switch to choose from two gain options. The Cool Tube designer, Mike Markure, used to be a forum member, and I can recall him discussing the preamp some years ago. I'm guessing that "medium impedance soundboard pickup" refers to the K&K Pure Mini and that the Schatten Design and OTSS SBTs would be in the same neighborhood with respect to impedance. If you're not feeling adventuresome, however, you can get the Tak SBT and install it exactly where they advise.
Oops. This is the link for CTP-1:
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/13...?page=8#manual
It appears that the two pickups can actually be blended before the EQ section, or that the EQ section would apply to the SBT if you only wanted to use that pickup and leave the other pickup at zero level. I'm not sure about that, but it seems to be the logic of how this preamp is designed. It really does seem to be a "cool" preamp design.
If it were me, I'd get in touch with David Enke at Open To Source Sensors and ask him if one of his SBTs has ever been used with a Cool Tube preamp. At the very least, he could send you the pickup pre-wired to an RCA connector. I'd go for the simpler #27 SBT, as I've personally had better results with that model.