Jonny explains, “We use double bass on stage which is inherently hard anyway. We had found some great pick ups from a company in Canada (magnetic Biesle System) and a Barcus Berry piezo. But the problem was that the pick-ups sounded OK, but required batteries which is never a great way of working. So we decided that we wanted to use professional mic pre’s which of course is on mains and would sound much better. But the first problem was loading the pick-ups properly as the manufactures standard specification of input impedance was never suited to pro-end mic pre’s. So, after some routing around a few conversations, I decided to go with a modified version of the SPL Gold Mike MkII. The guys at SPL modified the first channel to 1.5MOhms and the second to 2.2MOhms instrument input impedance. “

“Audibly, the result is excellent, the clarity is great and the ability to add some warm valve harmonics  to the Biesle pick up is also really good as this gives the full warm sound of the bass end, whereas the second channel is left clean for the piezo which gives the clicky finger sound. It’s also a great way of getting a lot of low end out of an instrument  like this without it feeding back.”     

“Arista (Guillemots bassist) is using in-ears and gets a piezo feed, and both Arista and the monitor engineer have commented on the Gold Mike’s lush sound.“

Click here to find out more about the SPL Gold Mike MkII