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Bored. What tone are you? Twangy? Thumpy?

What kinda tone are ya?

  • Stainless Steel roundwounds,a pick and a quick solid-state amp

    Votes: 28 8.1%

  • Stainless Steel roundwounds, Fingerstyle TWANG

    Votes: 113 32.8%

  • Love those nickel roundwounds, but does this amp have a tweeter?

    Votes: 72 20.9%

  • Kinda in between love those nickel roundwounds but I'm kinda mellow.

    Votes: 89 25.9%

  • Flatwounds and tubes. Gimme the THUMP.

    Votes: 74 21.5%

  • Give me the oldest,dirtiest greasy set of flatwounds you have.

    Votes: 28 8.1%
  • Total voters
    344
  • Poll closed .
#45
my amp settings always look like this...

Bass: 1 0'clock
low/high mids: 3 0'clock
highs: 12 0'clock

'94 Fender P w/ Fender 9050L flats, maybe a tad of compression or fuzz

Squier VM Jazz w/ slinky rounds, loads of compression and sometimes alotta fuzz

it really depends on my mood
 
#46
D'addario ProSteel stainless steels (except for fretless - EXPs having been doing a great job in both providing the best "Coated String Sound" IMO as well as protection of my fingerboard) that give me a cutting "piano"-esque tone and generally a "full" sound altogether with a bump in the low-mids and a slight cut of the low-end so things don't get "woolly" on me. Technique-wise I'm 75% fingerstyle, 20% pickstyle (and actively practicing to improve that) and 5% slap (ditto fingerstyle). Hybrid preamp although my preferred tone is much more solid-state, solid-state poweramp, and a mixture of 10"s & 12"s in my rig: I run a Clean/Dirty setup so Effects get the quick transients from the 2x10 while I still have a cabinet running a signal's worth of unaffected bass that get a slightly "bigger" tone from the 2x12. Bass-wise the vast majority of playing is split between Spector ReBops and Mike Lull Modern Jazz Basses both bolt-ons with active electronics, so while they each have their own sound I think they're both in the same ballpark.

It took much more than a few years of trial-and-error, but I came up with "My Sound" and it's working fine for me. :D
 
#50
It really boils down to which bass I'm using:

Fender Bass VI: Stainless Steel pick & finger, midrange sounding

Rick 4004: Nickel, finger, bass blob sound

MIM Jazz: Flats, finger, great sound but need a better Jazz someday

Ibanez P Bass imitation - Stainless steel, finger, really alive full sound.
 
#51
The tone I prefer is an alder/RW Precision with SS rounds, fingerstyle, no effects, through a cranked SVT with 8X10's. I can make that combo work for loud rock, blues, mellow R&B, funky stuff, and pretty much anything that I want to play.
 
#52
I feel that having one tone can be very limiting so I go for variety. That is one of the main reasons I love G&L. I use technique, bass controls, and amp EQ to coax different tones out of my basses. My band writes all originals so one of the things I work on is deciding what tone best suits the songs. If I haven't made that decision yet for a particular song, I will switch up my tonal approach to see what works and what doesn't. However quite often the tone I use doesn't matter that much so I switch up my tonal approach based on random decisions.
 
#56
i love so many bass tones it's hard to say. primarily active basses with nickel, pick, lots of mids, slight hair of od, with gk amp.

love the burp of a j single coil pickup played fingerstyle over the bridge too.

and ss is nice on occasion
 

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