26964379[/URL], member: 340182"]Despite how much it drives me insane that the unwashed TB masses immediately pounce on anyone who suggests unusually low tunings repeating the same things over and over again (the sound engineer will high pass it out, your cabs can't produce those frequencies, the audience won't care, etc), they do have some valid points. Whether it's an electric bass, an electric guitar, a piano, or anything other than a sine wave oscillator, when you play a specific note there are harmonics that also arise. So, when you play your open E string on your bass you're not getting just the 41.2 Hz sine wave of that note. You're also getting a bunch of higher frequencies. Our brains, for reasons I certainly don't know, can take the higher frequencies and kind of fill in the blank of the lower fundamental tone even when it's not actually present or is very low in volume. Kind of like how people can easily read words where one letter is missing or out of order, without having to give any conscious thought to it (not a perfect analogy, but not the worst either).
So in the case of Thou, whose bass player I believe tunes down to F0 or F#0, I would bet thousands of dollars in cash and prizes that the cabs he uses and the PAs he plays through are either not producing the fundamental note (21.83-23.12 Hz) at all or they're producing it at such a low volume that it's practically non-existent. More likely, what we're hearing is the upper harmonics of that F0 or F#0, and our brains are filling in the blanks.
The reality is that producing frequencies in the sub 40 Hz range is a non-trivial endeavor. Just to get the fundamental of those few lowest notes below 40 Hz in any meaningful volume in a live setting requires a LOT of power and equipment (cabs, in particular) devoted solely to that task. (Which reminds me, most modern bass amps have internal high pass filters that may not even be advertised because it helps protect people from themselves and 99.9999999% of people won't notice because their cabs can't produce any sound below 40 Hz at meaningful volumes, and the vast majority of people aren't tuning down in the sub-30 Hz range. To quote someone from GK when I asked about an internal HPF in one of their amps: "Yes, we have a HPF in the MB Fusion 800 as well as all our amplifiers and I would assume most amps on the market do as well. The deep switch just moves that HPF down a little lower, letting more of the sub freq. through. I would estimate its around a normal 50hz roll off and maybe moves that down to 40hz or so.")
All that said, I'm not one of the people on TB who instantly bashes people for wanting to venture into the very low frequencies. In fact I'm all about it. But I also like to think I can look at it objectively and say with confidence that producing those frequencies in a live setting at any meaningful volume is simply not feasible for 99% of people.
And then there's the issue of doing it on a recording...it's probably safe to say that 99.9999999% of people don't have playback systems (whether it's headphones, car stereo, or their home stereo if they even have one) that can produce much meaningful volume in the very low frequencies. Home theater has skewed that a bit, but even in that niche if people want to get the really low frequencies they're often using mechanical things that vibrate the seat a person is sitting in, rather than trying to make those super low sounds with speakers. I'm not a home theater guy, but I do have a pretty damn good stereo by any objective measure. My sub can go down to 14 Hz if I want to set it that low, and I'm going to add a second sub of the same model at some point. But how many people out there are spending more than $1,000 just for one sub? And even if I wanted to haul it to a venue, and even though it's more than enough for rattling the walls at home, it wouldn't be nearly enough on its own to do anything meaningful on stage.
Anyway I've rambled a bit but the bottom line is that I can just about guarantee that when listening to Thou, whether live or on record (which also reminds me that I think vinyl isn't capable of the really really low frequencies, but my memory is a bit sketchy about that), no one is hearing the fundamental of that F0 or F#0 but instead we're hearing the upper harmonics of it, along with a lot more "normal" bass frequencies than most bands use so overall the band is still sounding way lower than the vast majority of bands.
one day maybe!
