Hi all,

I'm an amateur bassist and was just wondering about a few things regarding my sound. I have a a Fender bassman400 head attached to a big Mesa Cab and a Geddy Lee Jazz bass. I have a decent technique on the frets and have no problems moving around but I'm finding when I compare my playing with online videos I just can't get the sound as nice as theirs. Is it my lack of a good tube head? I have played around with the settings trying different combinations without much luck. Comparing my slap/pop and fingering sound its always more squeaky or dull while theirs is bold and catchy. Am I missing some important pedals? any tips:confused:

Midrange is where it's at. If your head won't let you get some good mids going, you're going to have a "modern" sound as opposed to a "warm tube" sound. All this is subjective, however, since we have no clips of your tone. Whose tone do you want to sound most like?

Geddy uses SansAmp products to replicate a tube amp tone, so maybe that's the kind of thing you're looking for...? You'll have to head over to a music shop to find out for sure.

Whose videos are you comparing your sound to? Might not be fair comparing your sound to guys like Stanley Clarke or Dave LaRue ;)

It's almost all technique, BTW, but if you overboost your treble, you can get more noise than you should. All bass players have some inherent noise in their sound. You can work to eliminate it, but you never get rid of it entirely. Other instruments drown a lot of that noise out, though. So work to eliminate what you can and don't worry about what you can't.

What type of strings are you using? I find round wounds get the slap/pop sound.

most your sound comes from your hands, keep practicing. learning how to change your tone and sound with your hands is as much part of playing as practicing your scales.

I'm watching simple playing technique videos; just mutes and when they play their notes they get a zinging crisp sound so mixing that with mutes makes for some good sound. While with myself the notes are more like dull beeps so mixing with the mutes makes for a sound that is not good.

I tend to be very impatient when I play around with my settings... your looking at two nobs for each EQ low,mid,high. As well as additional ones for treble, bass, etc. So with that said I'll throw the nobs all over the place in hopes for a quick fix... I know lows are more bass and highs are bright. My understanding of integrating it all together is probably quite low however. Are there resources or templates available to get some decent settings going?

Thanks in advance.

Best thing to do with ANY bass or amp is to set everything flat and start from there. With active basses, that means put the tone controls to their center positions. With passive basses, turn the tone knobs up all the way. A lot of people stop right there with tonal changes, but if you have to make any changes, make them small. Sounds like you've gone a little overboard.

I didn't really understand tone at all until recently thanks to this puppy...

http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2005/Bass-PODxt-Live-sm.jpg

The Bass POD XT live (http://line6.com/basspodxtlive/index.html)

Like you I have a solid state amp, and tube amps didn't make sense to me...why would I pay more for an amp that is less clean sounding?...that was the only thing I judged amps on, now I understand that you need to find a something that doesn't sound clean in all the right ways...like a woman, a perfect woman is boring, she has to be flawed in a way that you like.

I started playing with the tones on this thing, its an amp emulator, like how you can emulate a super-nintendo game on your PC this can emulate an SVT on your Bassman (it will never be the same but its damn close). It became clear to me that a little fuzz/warmth, + the right EQ can make you sound like you belong in a given genre, and can also shape your playing style.

I would go to the store and check this thing out (or a similar product), or start plugging into a bunch of amps and try to find the sound you are looking for.

My understanding of integrating it all together is probably quite low however. Are there resources or templates available to get some decent settings going?

One more thing that makes this worth the dough is that it plugs directly into your computer, where you can record (with flawless quality), send audio from your computer to your amp/headphones, and download/edit tones on your computer (there should be a TB thread for this now that I think of it, I might have to start 1).