Settling a dispute...

[NineSpine]

My roommate claims that when he EQs bass, the best way to hear it is to boost 5khz. This sounds kind of ridiculous to me, so could someone please settle this issue.

[Nick Kay]

Well, the bass guitar's fundamentals and first overtones (basically, the meat and potatoes of the bass tone) end around 700Hz. There's still relevant tonal information up to about 3KHz, but just about anything after that is fret/string noise and clack. Heck, the treble control on guitar amps usually corners between 1KHz and 2.5KHz. I don't understand why anyone would want to hear 5KHz as the dominant frequency of a bass guitar, but different strokes for different folks. Personally, 80Hz to 300Hz is where I live.

[anderbass]

From your posts wording, it sounds like your roommate was just stating his own personal preference and just how he prefers to set his own amp. (he probably just read it somewhere on the net, so its just gotta be true right...

You could talk to 100 other Bassists and probably get 100 diferent EQ setting preferences for their own amps and the tone they personally dig.

Unless he's stating this is absolutely the way everyone should be EQing every bass amp ever made, I dont see any reason to attempt to prove his personal preferences are somehow wrong for him.

[bongomania]

Agreed. However IMO you're right to think it sounds ridiculous.

[PBass101]

I'm a guy who dials in a fair amount of treble in his signal, but a well-adjusted midrange is what is really going to carry a bass guitar, at least in a band setting. You can't rely on 5kHz alone to take you very far when set against drumset, a guitar player and a singer. Hell, alot of those higher frequencies can get lost completely when set against cymbal crashes and a guitar's higher register.

[tasty sweeps]

my highs are tuned at 12k and i find that when i want a kind of airy zing added to the overall sound, turning the knob does me good. i wouldn't call frequencies that high on a bass entirely useless.

after all, there are other ways to make sound with a bass besides just making the strings move.

a lot of bass amps don't have highs tuned at that frequency, and can't really produce them through the speakers. but mine can.

[Nick Kay]

Originally Posted by tasty sweeps

my highs are tuned at 12k and i find that when i want a kind of airy zing added to the overall sound, turning the knob does me good. i wouldn't call frequencies that high on a bass entirely useless.

I don't think anyone said they were entirely useless - just useless for the purpose of cutting through a mix, which is what the OP's dispute is about.

after all, there are other ways to make sound with a bass besides just making the strings move.

Theoretically, no, there isn't. Pickups generate signal based on the magnetic field over the pole pieces. If there isn't a disturbance of that magnetic field, there is no signal. The only magnetic thing over the pickups are the strings, and possibly jewellery. So, it can be posited that the pickups will not generate a signal unless the strings oscillate (or change their magnetic properties in some other way).

Of course, that's in a theoretically perfect world. In truth, there are some microphonic characteristics in the vast majority of pickups, and we have EMF all over the place. But in theory, you gotta move the strings - or wave some other magnetic material over the pickups at very high speeds.

[hbarcat]

When I mix songs in a rock recording, I almost always boost the bass track around 4,000-5,000 Hz as part of an overall strategy to allow the bass and guitars to have their own frequency space in the mix. More specifically:

Guitars - boost certain frequencies in the sweet spot from 1kHz to 3kHz, cut below 300Hz, cut above 3.5kHz

Bass - cut certain frequencies from 1kHz to 3 kHz (where you boosted the guitars) and boost frequencies between 4kHz to 5kHz (this makes up gain for what you cut). Below 300 Hz is tricky for the bass but understand that most of what you hear from the bass comes from between 100-200 Hz.


So the guy is right in that boosting the bass around 5kHz is commonly done in a group mix. But I don't think it's right to say that it's always done that way or even that it's the best way. The best way is what ends up sounding good to the listener. The most important part of mixing is EQing and knowing what to boost and what to cut. You start out with the more common traditional methods and see how it goes and often this works out fine and you may just need to fine tune the sound from there, but often you have to ignore the traditional methods and start experimenting.


I realize that you're talking about live sound, but the principle is the same and I use the same techniques when running the PA for my band.

[hbarcat]

Originally Posted by Nick Kay

Well, the bass guitar's fundamentals and first overtones (basically, the meat and potatoes of the bass tone) end around 700Hz. There's still relevant tonal information up to about 3KHz, but just about anything after that is fret/string noise and clack. Heck, the treble control on guitar amps usually corners between 1KHz and 2.5KHz. I don't understand why anyone would want to hear 5KHz as the dominant frequency of a bass guitar, but different strokes for different folks. Personally, 80Hz to 300Hz is where I live.

There is plenty of useful musical content to an electric bass up to about 6,000 Hz. While you are correct that the "meat and potatoes" of the bass is below 700 Hz (you say you live between 80 Hz and 300 Hz) if you decided to simply EQ out all content above say 4,500 Hz, you would lose a noticeable portion of the character of the bass, but most importantly to the topic, this frequency is a lot easier to hear for a live audience and it can, and does, help the bass to shine through in a live setting rather than muddying up the low end by boosting somewhere else. A little bit goes a long way here and a 3 dB boost at 5kHz can really help the audience hear a clean, well defined bass sound.

[Nick Kay]

Eh, different strokes for different folks. You can dig a more modern sound with a lot going on up-top, but I tear the tweeters out of bass cabs and run LPFs with the corner at 6K at the absolute highest. I've just never found a use for the stuff a bass produces up there, in a band context. Instead of trying to add clarity, I'd prefer to cut the mud out, personally.

I'm pretty sure I'm the majority, though. Most engineers I've met, in regards to a rock mix, like to cut the extreme lows on the bass, and then run an LPF on the bass roughly where the click / attack of the kick drum resides. After a shallow HPF higher up on the guitars, the mix practically sorts itself out.