Sukkar electric oud - improving sound by replacing pickups/pre-amp?
I have one of the "toilet seat" Sukkar electric ouds.
I only use it for practicing when traveling, so the sound does not need to be perfect, but no matter how I adjust the knobs on the pre-amp I can't
even get a comfortable sound for practicing.
The knobs aren't labeled so I don't know exactly what each one does.
1. The main problem is that one of the knobs seems to work like volume fader between bass and treble. So if I turn it in one direction, I can hear
treble notes clearly and in the other direction I can hear bass notes clearly, but there is no good "middle" setting that allows me to hear all 6
strings with equal volume. Either I can hear the top 4 strings clearly and the bottom 2 are almost slient, or vice versa.
2. The second problem is that the "attack" is very aggressive, but decays very fast. So when I pluck the string, first it is very loud with a sharp
sound, then immediately fades to a very low volume that I can barely hear. So I don't really hear the whole note. And if I turn up the volume enough
to hear the whole note clearly, the attack becomes much too loud to listen to with headphones.
Anybody with experience with the electronics in these ouds? Can I change the pickups or pre-amp to something else to get a more useable sound from
this oud?
Not sure if it makes a difference, but I guess the body is actually made for a larger scale length (63 cm?). I've moved the bridge to the 60 cm
position to mimic the string length of my normal oud.

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