- Dec 18, 2000
- 13,201
- 340
- Disclosures
- greenboy designs: fEARful, bassic, dually, crazy88 etc
I've got a rather extreme visual example of bass guitar output here, showing frequencies of the fundamental and overtones across the plot, and the timeline starting where the note is just struck at the back, leading to the front as it sustains and decays. You can see each partial of significant energy as its envelope changes.
Why is this example extreme? Well, for starters it's a very dark fretless bass/strings combination taken at F1 - 43.65 Hz fundamental - where the first fret would be. Also the sample was taken with both pickups blended about 50/50, which because of phase differences cancels a fair amount of energy above the fundamental and octave overtones until you get to the higher content.
That's that scooped sound one hears when blending two pickups on many basses. So. The area where the graph is truer green leading to aqua, from around 125 Hz to 350 Hz or so is diminished in output. If this was a fretted and brighter bass you'd still be seeing this, but there's be a lot more upper frequency content at the start of the note leading up to the 16th partial at 698.4 Hz, and some stuff up above there even for a brief period.
Another important factor here is that the pickups are Q-Tuners, which seem to reproduce a lot more fundamental content and less exaggeration through the spectrum than a lot of conventional wound pickups. The result is that yellow fundamental actually is a lot bigger with this example than it would be on most basses. And still, compared to the first overtone an octave above, it exhibits maybe just over half the energy on the average. Notice that octave overtone too: how it blooms a little after the inital attack, then during a period of over a second-and-a-half smoothly loses some output, to plane out even with the fundamental, before doing a nice big slow bloom to again dominate the mix.
I'll get to what all this means for rigs in a second post, but I want to first allow people some time to check this out and think about it, and to thank Passinwind for supplying me with the data I wanted, and understanding what I was after.
Why is this example extreme? Well, for starters it's a very dark fretless bass/strings combination taken at F1 - 43.65 Hz fundamental - where the first fret would be. Also the sample was taken with both pickups blended about 50/50, which because of phase differences cancels a fair amount of energy above the fundamental and octave overtones until you get to the higher content.
That's that scooped sound one hears when blending two pickups on many basses. So. The area where the graph is truer green leading to aqua, from around 125 Hz to 350 Hz or so is diminished in output. If this was a fretted and brighter bass you'd still be seeing this, but there's be a lot more upper frequency content at the start of the note leading up to the 16th partial at 698.4 Hz, and some stuff up above there even for a brief period.
Another important factor here is that the pickups are Q-Tuners, which seem to reproduce a lot more fundamental content and less exaggeration through the spectrum than a lot of conventional wound pickups. The result is that yellow fundamental actually is a lot bigger with this example than it would be on most basses. And still, compared to the first overtone an octave above, it exhibits maybe just over half the energy on the average. Notice that octave overtone too: how it blooms a little after the inital attack, then during a period of over a second-and-a-half smoothly loses some output, to plane out even with the fundamental, before doing a nice big slow bloom to again dominate the mix.
I'll get to what all this means for rigs in a second post, but I want to first allow people some time to check this out and think about it, and to thank Passinwind for supplying me with the data I wanted, and understanding what I was after.
