Greetings.

I have a stick on order, so I can't yet test this out; hence the following question.

I see many threads about preamps. Is the stick's output so low that a preamp is necessary? For example, in a studio, would the following signal chain be valid:

Stick > DI box > mic preamp > DAW.

Or is a preamp for the stick required prior to the DI box?

TIA,
-e.

Which pickup housing did you go with?
The Active block or the active mode on the Railboard are already pre-d, even in mono-mode.
For the passive blocks, without a proper instrument pre, your noise floor can become an issue. Especially if you are going directly to a mic-pre with a different gain structure...consider impedance matching as well.
Direct box, or a pair of them (stereo) would help, but again the dynamic control would be impacted.

If the mic pre is a mixer that should do it. Esp. if it has USB. You don't mention which p.u. the Stickup is the only one that may need a boost. What about tone shaping - or are you just relying on DAW plug-ins.

Something to think about - is the latency of your DAW.
It sucks when you don't hear the notes immediately when you tap the strings.

I'm curious if anyone has tried the TrickFish Trilobite?
https://www.trickfishamps.com/shop/trilobite/

Hmmmmm. A lot of "it depends".

Generally a Stick needs a preamp. Even if you have an ACTV-2 pickup, you probably want an additional preamp for added tone shaping. With that said though, there are plenty of options. For example, I use a pair of SansAmp DIs that are also preamps so my setup is Stick > DI > DAW

With that said, the main reason I use the DIs is because I like the way they sound. I could just as easily use a software preamp in which case I could scale down to Stick > DAW. This ... of course ... assumes that the audio interface I use to run my Stick into my computer has instrument level input.

The best reason I can think of to use a preamp is to have the best basic tone BEFORE you do any digital processing.

I recommend the StepABout for passive Stick pickups. It sounds great, has an incredibly low noise floor, very nice variable midrange control and a versatile routing matrix and headphone amp as well.

What Greg said!

This will be for a Grand Railboard. The Villex is apparently horribly back-ordered, and the EMG option isn't there yet. I told them to use whichever one is available first. No estimate as to the arrival/availability of either PU.

-e.

Do you play electric bass or guitar, and are you using pre-amps/modelers/effects devices already? You might be set already see what happens when you get your Stick and plug in. Or is Money Burning A Hole In Your Pocket? (what my Dad always said to me) I use a PODX3 on two different Sticks w/ 3 different pu's...Stickup, ACTV2 & PASV4 and I just vary the db knob for how hot (or not) the pu's are. The Stickup is the lowest, but the Villex (PASV4) is WAY hotter than the ACTV2. But if you are looking for The Hot Set-Up there is a lot of options for the Stick player - just check out the myriad of equipment posts. And keep asking questions - we like to jibber-jabber. As I said I'm still using a ten-year-old device thru a Mackie mixer (pre-USB) with a ZOOM H2 as USB interface and...it works. But if I had expendable income....

I should also point out here (and apologies but I do frequently run across people who don't realize this) that if you're running into a combo amp, you are already pre-amping.