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Amp head with active bass...??

M

musicman1

Jun 5, 2008
8
0
Green Bay, WI
www.myspace.com
#1
So I just bought myself a Music Man hd-130 amp pre 1975. Last wednesday i picked it up, and had it out of the box within minutes, to play it. For recording, and gigging in my band I use my Music Man Stingray 2007 limited edition bass. Now, I run all my knobs wide open, and let the amp do the equilizing, and when I started to play the amp, low tones started to fart out, and sounded really bad. I put my fender p bass through it, it sounded fine. Now being that I was using an active bass, would that push the volume a little bit more? Is there something that i could buy out there that would drop the db's down 15?

Thanks!
 
#2
musicman1 said:
So I just bought myself a Music Man hd-130 amp pre 1975. Last wednesday i picked it up, and had it out of the box within minutes, to play it. For recording, and gigging in my band I use my Music Man Stingray 2007 limited edition bass. Now, I run all my knobs wide open, and let the amp do the equilizing, and when I started to play the amp, low tones started to fart out, and sounded really bad. I put my fender p bass through it, it sounded fine. Now being that I was using an active bass, would that push the volume a little bit more? Is there something that i could buy out there that would drop the db's down 15?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Your Stingray uses active circuitry to buffer and equalize its tone. All you are doing by diming everything is overdriving your amp's preamp. Reset your tone knobs to flat and adjust your volume until you get sufficient level out of your amp and tone until it sounds best. Diming everything with a passive bass, like the P-Bass, makes sense. Diming everything on your Stingray defeats the purpose of it being active to begin with.
 
#3
Totally agreed. Too many people think active means you should crank it at all times, when you should leave it flat and only make small boosts when you need them, not great big drastic ones. Same with the head.
 
#4
+1 Do not dime the EQ knobs, that's just bad use of the preamp (unless you are trying to get a particular extreme "effect" that way). Also, you asked for something which would lower the dB of your signal... that "something" would be the volume knob on the bass. ;)
 

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