Using a DI Box for Bass Guitars - AudioTech

Hi, welcome to another episode of Audio Tech. Today I want to talk about how to hook up your bass guitar using a DI. So there's a couple ways you're going to want to do this on stage. You've got your choices. I would probably use something like a small amp on stage and today's amps, many of them have a DI built in on the back panel. As this one does, it'll have an XLR jack and it'll say direct out on it. Okay, or this same jack might be located on the front. And if that's the case, then you would run your guitar straight into the front of your amplifier the way you normally would. And then you would take an XLR jack or an XLR cable, mic cable in other words, and you would plug this into the back of your amp. And then the other end, you would run into a floor jack on the stage or run it into your stage snake or directly into the mixer if you're mixing right from the stage itself. And that's it. You don't even need a DI because it's built into the head of the amplifier. Okay, now if you want, you can, you know, you can kick back the amp and this one kicks back like this so that the sound is directed up and you can, the amp becomes your own monitor. And then this would send the bare signal of your bass straight to the front of house system. The other way you would do it is if you had an older bass amp and this is not an option, then you're going to have to run your DI in between the two. So you're going to run your bass cord coming out of your bass and you're going to want to pick up a little DI box or hope your sound man has one. But just like I say for the acoustic guitar video, if you're a bass player, I would just suggest buying one. Sometimes you may not want to haul this around. Other times you might be having limited space on stage and you just don't have room for big huge bass rigs. So you can run your bass straight into the input jack of your DI box of your choice. I'm using an RZ direct series here. And then from your back of the output, you would run your mic cable out and it would go straight into the floor or your mixer or the snake input channel that you're going to run the bass on. So now I've eliminated the bass amp, but I would listen to myself through stage monitors. Okay, so that's how easy it is to set up a DI box. Again, you would just run your bass into the DI box input and run it straight into wherever you're plugging in. If you want to include a bass amp on stage that does not have a built-in DI, then you're going to have another cable and you're going to run the cable from the input through on your DI box. You're going to come back out the DI box and then plug in the other end of the cable straight into your amplifier. And so that's how you can split the signal from your high Z output of the bass instrument goes into the DI box, continues the signal into your amp while splitting it to a low Z impedance level for your mic line. So that's the options as a bass player. That's at least three options, I think. So hope that helps you bass players out there. Whether you want to take a bass amp or whether you need a DI box or bypass the bass amp, you've got lots of choices and it's a very easy box to use. And again, if you get ground line interference, you usually have a ground lift button on these boxes. So if you get that nasty 60 cycle hum going, hit that switch and it'll kill it. So hope you found the video helpful. Please hit the like button and the share button and stay tuned for more videos coming up next week. More DI's. So thanks for watching. Have a good day now.