They probably need to hear themselves better. Both pickups helps them do that. I'm assuming this because they are all DI. Could also be the monitor setups are inadequate for what most are used to hear.
All guesses of course.
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Bassists seem to always crank both pickups...
- Thread starter Chad T
- Start date
All guesses of course.
Play direct at church. I must be able to hear myself so if the volume is at 100% and I can't her myself, I have no choice be to add volume by boosting at the eq.
In a perfect world my bass would be set flat and I'd have an eq for what I hear and the house can do what ever they wan't .
In reality the IEM system (Samepage) is fed from the house pre-faider but post eq so I'm out of luck.
I've learned to just let it go.
In a perfect world my bass would be set flat and I'd have an eq for what I hear and the house can do what ever they wan't .
In reality the IEM system (Samepage) is fed from the house pre-faider but post eq so I'm out of luck.
I've learned to just let it go.
As a player: I've played through the same monitors on the same stage. An even pickup blend is a challenge onstage as well. I end up backing off slightly or even at times solo a single pickup. It just seems to work better, is easier to hear, and sits in the stage mix better. Same thing seems to apply to FOH.
One person asked earlier in the thread if our system has been a piecemeal process. It indeed has. There are some cable messes and general craziness. Which leads me to think there could indeed be a technical issue that compounds this problem in our specific sanctuary. I am in the process of cleaning up the system and hopefully get some things lined out. Also, I will say that bass, for me personally, is the hardest thing to mix. I don't have much trouble with the other inputs and we have several vocalists, electric & acoustic guitars, keys, drums, etc.
A thread tangent, FWIW: bass can be particularly hard to slot in mixes (such as the typical volunteer P&W team mix) where the bottom is crowded by the low end of multiple guitars and keys. In a volunteer worship team, the playing styles of the acoustic guitarists and keyboard players often make the busy low end worse. Acoustic players who aren't used to ensemble playing often give you a lot of bass-string heavy strumming on every subdivision of every measure, just as keyboardists used to playing solo often lean on too busy left-hand parts. The resulting band "arrangement" doesn't leave much room for the bass guitar to be intelligible in the mix until you have it too loud.
While the real cure in those cases is to coach better ensemble playing and arrangements, an intermediate treatment is to put a high pass filter on keys and guitars, and trim away as much of the bottom end of those instruments as you can without cutting into their core full-mix voicing. That is, when one of the high-passed instruments is soloed you might notice that some bass frequencies have been cut away, but you won't miss that instrument's trimmed low frequencies in the full mix. Once you've dealt with keys and guitars, high-pass the vocal mics, too (but be careful not to cut your bass vocalists off at the legs). You'll just notice way less murkiness in the full band mix, and you should find that the bass can now be mixed more clearly without dominating the mix.
Last edited:
When I play my Jazz I have both my volume pots on full and my tone somewhere in the middle. Why? The tone pot is where it is because that's where I like the sound. And the vol pots are where they are in part because that's where I like the tone, and in part because it keeps the pup noise down. This is a passive bass though. With my active HH bass, I balance the pups and adjust the EQ entirely on where I want my tone to be. I question whether the dead sounding ness might be the stage or other artifacts of the room rather than the bass signal.
And there's your problem.
I dunno about anyone else but I'm dialing in what I want to hear from my amp as a player. I have no way of knowing what FOH is doing or how to fix it in a way that doesn't beat my playing tone up. A raw signal directly from my instrument?...yeah, that's gonna cause a problem if you're not using your own preamp with compression before it hits the board.
Its hard to know where to start with this question. The OP seems to realize that he opened a can of worms here.
1.) Crank both pickups? What kind? Do they have individual volumes or just a pan? Passive, active, jazz, humbuckers; what? My experience is that the volume of my bass is a little lower when I am panned to the center. And do we "all" do it, hard to say but largely I'd say yes. 90% of the time all bass players leave their volume, for what ever it is, at 100%. Some active EQs are different, but I tend to run all of mine at the center positions, adjusting as I need to.
2.) It sounds like you think a bass should only sound one way. Sorry, but that ain't how it works. I have my sound that I have crafted, as the sound guy its your job to just make it louder through the PA. I don't need you to fix anything.
3.) If you think the signal is coming in too hot from your DI, turn down your DI or the settings on the board. Your sphere of control begins and ends with your equipment. Personally I don't want ANYONE messing with my settings. I'm the bass player, I'll handle the bass. You're the sound guy, handle the PA.
1.) Crank both pickups? What kind? Do they have individual volumes or just a pan? Passive, active, jazz, humbuckers; what? My experience is that the volume of my bass is a little lower when I am panned to the center. And do we "all" do it, hard to say but largely I'd say yes. 90% of the time all bass players leave their volume, for what ever it is, at 100%. Some active EQs are different, but I tend to run all of mine at the center positions, adjusting as I need to.
2.) It sounds like you think a bass should only sound one way. Sorry, but that ain't how it works. I have my sound that I have crafted, as the sound guy its your job to just make it louder through the PA. I don't need you to fix anything.
3.) If you think the signal is coming in too hot from your DI, turn down your DI or the settings on the board. Your sphere of control begins and ends with your equipment. Personally I don't want ANYONE messing with my settings. I'm the bass player, I'll handle the bass. You're the sound guy, handle the PA.
With a passive Jazz bass there is no such thing as cranking the pickups. The only thing the knobs do is reduce. If you don't like the sound balanced then ok, that's fine. But lowering the overall output just increases STN and likely doesn't drive the input of whatever preamp is next in line very well. Having pickups at the same volume allows for moving the hand position forward or backward to produce a variety of tones without having a great disparity in volume at the different positions.
It took years of playing for me to realize that the full on both pups maxed that sounds great solo'ed when I'm at home, doesn't sit well in a mix. Further more, it took years for me to find a more mid heavy tone that sits better in the mix without the need for more volume. If it's a driving section, I will lean towards the bridge pup with a slight boost to my low mids. If it's a softer section and I want a nice smooth tone, I will favor the neck but rarely do I run full on both pups.
It seems to take too much energy to sit in the mix when you have both pups at full, or at a 50/50 if you have a blend knob. I am always favoring one or the other depending.
When mixing, try rolling their lows off a bit and giving them a boost at that 500hz range.
What seems to be a common misconception is what sounds good by itself must sound good in the mix. This is hardly ever true with you have competing frequencies in a mix of drums, guitars, vocals, and what ever else you are throwing at it. Bass seems to be the hardest to mix as it's the easiest to make the entire mix into mud, but a good mix is oh so sweet!
With all respect, that claim doesn't hold water. There are lots of mixes, and among them space for many different bass tones. Moreover, a player with reasonably versatile touch can get a range of tones from a Jazz bass with both pups at full volume. Dimed Jazzes have been recorded and gigged to good effect countless times since 1960.
Last edited:
I ALWAYS run my Jazz bass with the neck pickup cranked, and the bridge at about 80-90% full volume, same with the tone, allows me to clean up the signal so much easier, and to my ears it just sounds awesome!
No disrespect taken. I was just sharing my experiences, and while my reply was somewhat generalized, so was the OP generalization that all bass players run both pups full. With all of that said, you are going to tell me that all these recordings from 1960's and forward did no EQ adjustment to get it to sit in the mix? I am rather intrigued at the recording and engineering technique used in these jazz recordings where both pups were at full volume. Can you elaborate?
Hard to read your tone here, but I'll take it as a matter of good faith that you're being straightforward here rather than snarky. If so, here's where your studio experiences over the years have apparently been very different from mine. There's no one path to tape/disk, much less one magic way to handle bass in a mixing session. For that matter, the four Fender J's I currently own each sound very different, even when they're each recorded with me playing and with neck and bridge pups full up. (One is a vintage J w/ flats, one's a Jazz Deluxe w/ a vintage neck wearing rounds, one MIM J w/ rounds, and one fretless J—none of them particularly hard to slot into a mix with both pups full up.)
What I'm rejecting is the contention that a dimed J is somehow inherently hard to fit in a mix. Individual Js are versatile, and any given J in any given player's hands is capable of sounding different from the next. Will a dimed J fit every mix or suit every player? Of course not. But is it somehow ill-voiced and unworkable for studio and live work? Absolutely not.
Not snarky at all. It has been my experience that mixing bass to be the hardest to get right out of all the instruments. Mix it right and you can hear it on any system. Don't mix it right and you'll have to pass out subs with every copy of your mix. I was hoping for some practical suggestions for full on pups where sitting in the mix is difficult. Sounds like the original poster as well as my self could use the advise as it is clear not everyone has the tone figured out with their right hand (on a R Handed player) or string selection. That being said, rolling one or the other pup back a bit gives me the easiest time to get settled in the mix where I know the sound guy will just ride the fader and not change my tone on stage or otherwise. I'm not a fan of generalized comments, but generally speaking, that has my been my experience.
Of my 16 basses, 14 have two pickups. For the last 20+ years I have played every single gig with a two-pickup bass, almost always with the pickups blended to the center. I have never suffered loss of mid-frequencies as you described. If I want a little extra punch in the mids, I roll it a little toward the bridge. Also, in that 20+ years, I have run sound for my own bands and others' bands and never experienced what you described, at least not in a context attributable to pickup blend. Your issues lie elsewhere, and I'm going to guess it has more to do with PA speaker placement and EQ.
Hard to say without hearing your tracks. SO, FWIW, here's the brief general advice I'd like to give my younger self (if that younger self had been tracking to disk instead of to tape):
- If you don't hear exactly the tone that will fit in the final mix, track your bass clean, through a detailed preamp. Don't bump eq or squash the signal with compression during tracking unless you confidently hear how your tone will fit in the mix. Re-amping or processing the bass is easier than retracking. (If you *need* dirt or delay during tracking to get the feel, run a clean DI line in addition to your cab mic.)
- You won't realize it for a couple years, but your right hand technique isn't where it should be. You'll need to woodshed while attending to dynamics. In the meantime, practice overdubbing parts of bass lines (rather than just automating mixes) until you can comp together a track where the bass sits right because that's the way you played it. (McCartney used to do this at Abbey Road; and if it worked for him, it's good enough for you, Younger Me.) Don't give up trying to record single "keeper" takes, but don't make a fetish out of them.
- When you start paying serious attention to dynamics, you'll first work on evening out your volume, and you'll take that too far. In most genres, your lines need to sing a bit to fit in while still carrying a compelling groove.
- When you start getting serious about locking in with the drum kit, you'll focus on the kick drum. It'll take a while to realize the importance of leaving space for the snare drum.
- Place more value on space than you do now: space in between phrases, and space in between notes. A too-sparse line won't glue the mix together. But an over-busy bass line will be hard to slot into the mix—as will a line played with all the pitches blurred together.
- When mixing and arranging, sometimes you need to change what other instruments are doing to make the bass work. Ensemble playing takes a team.
Above all, do what works for you (Pako, not younger me). You're in a better spot than I am if you're 100% getting FOH mixes that don't try to turn your bass into the mixer's notion of larger-than-life club or festival sound.
Last edited:
That is all great sound advise! No pun intended.
It's hard to read sencerity on the net, but your contribution is appreciated. I am a life long study and as long as my fingers are working, I plan to be working it.
There are facts and opinions.
Opinion:
Jazz basses with pickup balance at equal levels don't cut through the mix.
Maybe, maybe not, depending on the bass, the mix, the player, etc.
Fact:
Jazz basses with pickup balance at equal levels have some mid frequency cancellation compared to pickup balance at unequal levels.
You may not hear the mid scoop, or it may not bother you (you may even prefer it), but it's there.
Opinion:
Jazz basses with pickup balance at equal levels don't cut through the mix.
Maybe, maybe not, depending on the bass, the mix, the player, etc.
Fact:
Jazz basses with pickup balance at equal levels have some mid frequency cancellation compared to pickup balance at unequal levels.
You may not hear the mid scoop, or it may not bother you (you may even prefer it), but it's there.
Last edited:
