My band is going to have to make some changes.

[Meddle]

Hey all.

I play in a few bands in Edinburgh, but my main band has broken up for the summer. The deal is this, the drummer lives in Hungary, the singer lives in Peru and the guitard lives in France. We are students in Edinburgh but we go home during the summer.

Now before summer I was playing on roundwound strings through as many effects pedals as I could run and with the usual scoopedy mids smiley EQ setup.


Over the summer I have found that fewer effects yield better results, and recently I have taken to not using any at all (I get paranoid about tone suck and/or cables not perfoming well enough).

I've also started to use groundwound and flatwound strings. I found some cheaper strings online made by Picato and I got some to experiment. When I first got flatwound strings I was unimpressed missing the biting attack and sustain. However I've grown to love the lack of harmonic overtones and the woodier tone in general. I just put some groundwounds on my only bass that had fresh rounds on it, so now I either have well played rounds, grounds and flats at my disposal.

Coincidentally I was getting tired of the scooped tone. Half the time I felt I was having to over work to be heard and the other noises that came into play annoyed me. I was also sick of the boomy 100hz region of my eq smile, so I reworked that and now I have a frowny shape. So suddenly I'm really digging the mid frequencies, cutting off the really bassy frequencies and the high treble frequencies.

Therefore when my band reform next month (and we have gigs as soon as that happens) they are getting a totally different bassists back.

Anybody else got stories of sudden complete overhauls of technique, rig or tone?

[Drop-the-One]

I've always hated smiley faces. Frowny faces are too sad.

I've come to love taking some of 150-300hz out and adding 2K to expose everything a happy medium.



I'd say my biggest overhaul was when I stopped unintentionally PLUCKING the strings like an amateur and used the tips of my fret fingers instead of the fatty parts. That got me out of beginner-mode and everyone was so happy in the ears that I did that!

[Ski3223]

Within the last 6 months I have:

Upgraded from a $100 salvaged OLP bass from pawn shop,
To a 3EQ Stingray.

Went from a "smiley face" to nearly flat EQ with a bit of mid boost.

Radically altered the intensity of my plucking technique.

Started slapping a whole lot more (and better).

Watched Victor Wooten's groove workshop (totally life changing).

Forced myself to stop playing out when the music is lacking anything too interesting and focused on really grooving.

It's been a pretty intense change to say the least.

[M0ses]

One day I realized, hey why don't I just leave this EQ thing flat?

And wow was that cool. Flats on a P into a flat amp.....dayum. Cuts like nothing else. It thumps, it growls. Whatever.

[uglymutt]

Good to hear that i'm not the only one that generally keeps their EQ flat.
Wonder how the sound will fit in the band situation, you may find you need to make some modifications.
Good luck to you!

[Essen]

I keep changing my eq from a thick middy sound, to a zingy kind of Tool setting. Trying to change between these setting w/o a fotswitch during songs is somewhat impossible.

[Rob Lewis]

Originally Posted by M0ses

One day I realized, hey why don't I just leave this EQ thing flat?

And wow was that cool. Flats on a P into a flat amp.....dayum. Cuts like nothing else. It thumps, it growls. Whatever.

That's the voice of reason. A lot of people apply EQ 'cos it's there. I use a Roland CUBE 100 set for Super Flat, no EQ. Works for me.

[thehiros]

Yeh, EQ flat all the way!
I keep hearing this is too bassy and loud and that is too bassy and loud, but it's allllll in the fingers.

[Meddle]

I have a problem getting a flat response out my amp. Its a Laney of some sort and even when you flatten the eq it still has an 'enhance' knob which is pushing the q around a little bit. Actually a lot of this amp sucks. It has an unusably small metal tweater I always have off as well.

The downside to all this is that playing by myself (so to speak) does not sound as cool. No hifi top end or as much crunch, but I can imagine in a band setting it will rock. It annoyed me at old band practices that if I played during the breaks between songs I had a massively loud tone with quite a lot of top end that vanished when we all played together.

[Unrepresented]

Originally Posted by Essen

I keep changing my eq from a thick middy sound, to a zingy kind of Tool setting. Trying to change between these setting w/o a fotswitch during songs is somewhat impossible.

Can't some of that be accomplished with some tone knob/volume adjustments?

I use a mild overdrive in a similar fashion -- raise up some mid frequencies and cut some highs.

[intheory]

Here's another bassist that flat lines his graphic eq...

[Rocks]

Every gig we play I start with a flat EQ at sound check. I make some adjustments during sound check to fit the room and amount of people in there. My EQ still stays pretty close to flat with only small bumps in certain frequencies to help cut through. When I first read my Trace Elliot amp manual it explain that the EQ should be close to flat and if you bump something up something else should also be bumped down to keep the overall EQ from being used more like a volume control. I do make quick adjustments during the gig as the amount of people change the rooms sound.