analysis paralysis rant

[DaveParker39]

I'm currently in one of those places where I sit around fiddling with knobs and questioning my settings and gadgets and it is getting in the way of my playing.

Admittedly as someone with OCD I am predisposed to do it, but I seem to be doing it more lately. Chasing some uncertain tonal sweet spot.

I know the answer is to just PLAY and stop thinking so much, but it's still obnoxious at the moment.

Anyway, rant over, and here this is in case you ever find yourself in a similar spot wondering if it's "just you"... it's not!

 

[Oddly]

Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing, for sure. Pre-internet, pre-TalkBass, I happily spent years just playing gigs without a care for different strings, frequencies, all the stuff folk here seem to obsess about.
Audiences danced and sang along, I got paid(admittedly badly), everyone seemed happy.
Yet looking back, based on current knowledge, I was almost certainly doing all sorts of stuff wrong.

 

[eniac]

I'm not OCD but I do like things to sound as best I can make them. Although I've got a lot going on, my favorite hobby is, or was, designing and building tube preamps, just for my own enjoyment. Starting back in March 2017 up until now, I've come up with 147 designs. About half of them sound really good. 15-20% sound (imo) killer.

Well, after hundreds of hours of having done this, and having absorbed an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge about how small-signal tubes really behave, one day I asked myself, "So, what return have I gotten? In light of the list below, after all's said and done, wasn't this a well-camouflaged trap masquerading as useful work?"

1. Human hearing changes from day to day, morning to evening, and it's seasonal/humidity-related.

2. When one is playing in a band, minor differences from one design to another disappear in the mix, along with a ton of other variables.

3. The people at the sound board can make a stellar design sound like ass, or an "acceptable" design sound great.

4. The sound system's capabilities can... see #3.

5. Where someone's standing or seated in the audience can have enormous effects on how a bass guitar sounds. A few feet left or right or closer or further away can make a huge difference.

6. How the room is treated acoustically... again see #3.

I'm dead serious when I post the following link. And I too plead "Guilty". (You may have to log in to sidestep a "Video unavailable" error.)

 

[SpyderX]

Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing, for sure. Pre-internet, pre-TalkBass, I happily spent years just playing gigs without a care for different strings, frequencies, all the stuff folk here seem to obsess about.
Audiences danced and sang along, I got paid(admittedly badly), everyone seemed happy.
Yet looking back, based on current knowledge, I was almost certainly doing all sorts of stuff wrong.

Ah yes, the good 'ol days. We didnt have alot of choices back then, either - and certainly not as many outlets to 'encourage' us to question ourselves. I appreciate that the experience of others can be had with just a click, but often times, it turns into a detrimental rabbit hole.

 

[Camaro69]

I bought a guitar, which threw my entire routine and starting point out the window just trying to get use to it
Already just playing made up passages and jotting them down as notes and not tabs. It's been a game changer

 

[Pdaddy1978]

Tone chasing.... The rabbit hole that has no bottom.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

I'm currently in one of those places where I sit around fiddling with knobs and questioning my settings and gadgets and it is getting in the way of my playing.

Admittedly as someone with OCD I am predisposed to do it, but I seem to be doing it more lately. Chasing some uncertain tonal sweet spot.

I know the answer is to just PLAY and stop thinking so much, but it's still obnoxious at the moment.

Anyway, rant over, and here this is in case you ever find yourself in a similar spot wondering if it's "just you"... it's not!

I think the best way to overcome this do not play by yourself, but with others. When playing with others you should have a lot more important things you should be worried about than finding your latest unicorn tone. As long as it sounds like a bass, to the vast majority nobody is going to give a rip.

 

[2saddleslab]

Been there, done that. KISS
I Keep It Simple cause I'm Stupid.

 

[Pings Bass]

It's helpful to think of your bass like an acoustic instrument. What's the best sound you can get with it unplugged? What technique makes it vibrate the best? Practice and memorize that technique. Then plug in straight with no efx and flat eq and work your technique the same way. This, IMO, produces the best tone you're going to get. Then worry about the knobs. Knobs can help accentuate good tone, but they can't create it.

 

[DanAdams]

You can also get obsessive about subtracting options and gear rather than adding.
I'm into one pickup, tone up, DI, and nothing else.
Dang, bass guitars just sound good Au naturel.

Any persnickety tone chasing in just the context of bass sound is hopeless.
The bass is one part of a song. The tone choice should benefit the song, not the bass player's notion of tone.

 

[Mr Joshua]

I get this. Huge struggle for me.

I drive myself nuts and have questioned whether it’s so unhealthy that I should QUIT playing bass altogether because it’s so mentally consuming and financially disadvantageous at times. Buying and selling pedals, amps and basses only to question the decision and repurchase things I just got rid of. Over and over. Then I drag other poor souls into my nonsense and make people like @rojo412 install and switch pickups 5x.

I have a guitar buddy who tries to reel me in when he recognizes I’m doing the thing again, reminds me to just play. Don’t focus on everything being perfectly the way you think it should or could be. Just play. If I follow his instructions I forget all about the “problems” I’m creating and just end up playing and enjoying myself.

The suggestion to not play alone is actually great advice. I think it’s oftentimes when I’m practicing alone and focusing on tone that will never be the tone on record or in a band setting, just me in headphones, that’s when I start to really get weird. But that’s not a real world tone. No one will ever put headphones on and listen to my isolated bass. So I know how nonsensical my fabricated quests are. Which makes them all that much worse I suppose when I’m in that mode. I know it’s stupid.

KISS is cliche but useful. Sometimes stepping away from the sources of option paralysis, plugging into the most basic setup you can create and playing. Leave the pedals and amps and options out of it until you feel like you can bring things back into the fold without disrupting your zen. If you feel like you’re starting to obsess, back off, go back to stripped down.

I know it sounds insane to some people and that’s fine. I’m glad this isn’t an issue for you. But for some people it’s a real thing and it’s can be a lot.

 

[shirojiro]

I find that I get obsessive as well, but even when trying to simplify, I find ways to obsess.

Part of the obsession is reading TalkBass though, and sometimes taking a break from reading forums helps me get grounded back in reality.

These days, I’m playing my white Aerodyne Precision : 4 string, 20 frets, one pickup, passive electronics.

I’m still obsessing over strings now!

And I’ve pared down my electronics to one preamp and a clip on tuner, and still, there’s many choices.

It’s a battle.

 

[57pbass]

This is not bass related but directly related to the title of this thread..

I watched a video just yesterday about the success of Trader Joe’s.

The moderator used the “paralysis by analysis” phrase to describe the way the folks at Trader Joe’s have stocked their shelves.. they compared a traditional aisle of breakfast cereals from a local chain mega supermarket that had multiple levels of cereal choices to Traders Joe’s which only offers one choice of their variety making the decision fast and simple.

Instead of feeling empowered by choice, you feel stuck.

 

[joeLowB]

I think the best way to overcome this do not play by yourself, but with others. When playing with others you should have a lot more important things you should be worried about than finding your latest unicorn tone. As long as it sounds like a bass, to the vast majority nobody is going to give a rip.

^^^^^^^^^^^ This.

I'm with the OP... totally understand.

What I find helps me listening to similar local bands, especially the bass. When I'm honest with myself, I noted that a solid sound, on time, on pitch, works.

Seriously.

It's been a mental trip for me . This has helped.

Best.

.

 

[Ron Berenato]

I used to play through a rack mount compressor/preamp/Amp configuration that had me constantly fiddling with settings between songs. I went to a music store and traded it all in for a much simpler amp with volume/tone/mid/bass/a very simple graphic EQ. It was a high end tube amp so my tone didn't suffer but there were way fewer knobs to fiddle with. Then I settled on a single, simple, useable tone and it cured me.

 

[Fuzzbass]

I'm currently in one of those places where I sit around fiddling with knobs and questioning my settings and gadgets and it is getting in the way of my playing.

Admittedly as someone with OCD I am predisposed to do it, but I seem to be doing it more lately. Chasing some uncertain tonal sweet spot.

I know the answer is to just PLAY and stop thinking so much, but it's still obnoxious at the moment.

Anyway, rant over, and here this is in case you ever find yourself in a similar spot wondering if it's "just you"... it's not!

We accept you, we accept you. One of us! One of us!

Totally get it. When I was rack rigging I had access to a whole lot of knobs from preamps and compressor. This was especially true after I acquired a four band fully parametric equalizer: I would obsess about getting the settings exactly correct. It was like cocaine: "OK, sounds great now, but let's tweak more so it sounds EVEN BETTER!" I was usually too busy to obsess at the gig (thank goodness), but would regularly get comments from bandmates at rehearsal: "Dude, it's fine! Give the damn knobs a rest!"

It's why I've mostly avoided digital/programmable. I got a Zoom B1on bass multi-effect as a gift many years ago, requested by me because it was inexpensive. It's nice enough for the price, but after two months I put it away and have barely touched it since.

Life got simpler when I changed from rack rigging to amp-plus-pedals. 1 to 3 pedals, depending -- yes, 3 pedals offers a fair amount of knobs, but still fewer than the rack rig. The good news: I got older and wiser. I more easily recognized when fresh strings would help more than knob tweaking!

More importantly, I've finally accepted the general principle that "perfect is the enemy of good enough". My biggest board contains 6 pedals -- I put it together for my Cheap Trick tribute band, to emulate the sound of 12-string bass. I am proud to say that now that it's dialed in, I rarely touch it.



P.S. Recently, I've had serious GAS for the Darkglass Anagram, in part because the user interface seems WAY more intuitive than my Zoom multieffect (and let's not even talk about my guitarist brother's Quad Cortex). But I can't bring myself to pull the trigger: it's still way too large a rabbit hole for my analog brain.

 

[logdrum]

financially disadvantageous at times.

This ^^^^

 

[ImTheOnlyOne]

...Chasing some uncertain tonal sweet spot.

Maybe take my latest approach? Combine a handful of pedals to enable a wide range of "sweet spots" for tones both supremely practical and wildly impractical.

A preamp with pre and post DI, hpf, and effects loop.
An EQ-able overdrive
A quiet, high quality compressor
A saturator
A digital multi-effect

For me, for now, a Subway+, DCX, Becos, Deco, and HX One.

 

[Prodigus Filius]

Deal with knob twiddling on the bass at least by getting rid of the damned things he he

 

[Deleted member 394181]

After a few hours of too many adjustments, ill be happy with my sound. Then the next day it sounds totally different and not in a good way. Ear fatigue? Idk.!?