"Discovering Tone"

[will33]

Man...tons of good info in this thing.

In general, I'd say, yes. All the grade A gear in the world won't help somebody who's lost or doesn't know what they're after. All it'll do is throw your clams out there loud and clear for everyone to hear.

In general, when carrying a room with your rig, a tone that sounds a bit too midrangey and weak in the lows compared to what you'd like to hear up close often sits really well and makes a professional sounding band out front. Likewise, a tone you like up close will be too boomy/muddy/wishywashy out front and make your band sound a lot more inferior than it really is. It's just one of those things you have to get used to.


+1 to top studio guys...or local folks who get called to fill in for that matter...listening to the big picture and putting themselves in it. Rather than coming from a standpoint of "my instrument sounds best like this, now everybody work around that". This applies to all instruments and all skill levels equally....it's the difference between being a musician and a player.


To the OP, one of your early responses is the best thing you could do right now. That is to sit down with your gear, doesn't matter if it's 15 watts or 1500....$15 or $15,000....and set everything straight up, then turn each and every control all the way up and all the way down and everywhere in between and see how they all affect the sound. Do this by yourself and also do it while playing with others. The "good settings" should be quite different in those 2 cases.

 

[engedi1]

This!!!
I speak from experience. My own and
my friend is one of the top violinists in the world.
He spends all day making four notes sound perfect.
He's not on Talkviolin worrying about rosin.

Classical players spend eternity on their tone, because their hands are all they have to get that tone. I studied upright classically for years, and I know how hard you have to work to get good tone on the doghouse. To this day I mostly practice electric bass without the amp as that I want a big, clean, powerful sound that I produce. And, I hate lugging my amp upstairs.
All that said, you had better believe I have a nice bass and a good amp! I think it is all in the hands, and then all in the mind as to knowing how to use your gear to get the tones you seek.

 

[LiquidMidnight]

Agreed that it's hard to make poor equipment sound wonderful, but I was referring more towards the fact that it's almost impossible for a player without the tone "built in" to get a good tone by simply buying pro level gear. I saw this numerous times at NAMM. Guy comes into the booth, picks up a 3k Nordy plugs into 3K worth of my amps and sounds horrible. Yet the next player picks up the same bass and without touching a dial, manages to get unbelievably great tone from the exact same signal chain. When you hear this over and over again for days, you come to realize just how much of your tone is simply coming from your fingers.

Ahh, gotcha. In my humble experience, high-end gear usually makes bad players sound worse, because it's designed to be extremely responsive to the player. It's like taking someone who just got their driving permit and sticking them behind the wheel of a Formula 1 race car. Due to their inexperience, they're gonna be more likely to crash due to not being able to handle all of the horsepower the car has.

 

[coyote1]

One of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around was how different playing in a band mix is from playing at home alone.

At home I'd find tone so beautiful it'd make a grown man weep, same settings but louder in band practice and it sounded like crap. Or it'd sound great on the E & A strings but the D & G would be inaudible. Or I'd cut through with so much mids that I felt like a buzzsaw...

No real solution in my case besides realizing that home-tone and band-tone were two completely different beasts, and then keeping track of my settings with the band and trying different things to improve the mix.

To me, the obvious solution to this has always been to not worry too much about tone when I'm playing on my own. Just make sure all the notes come through clean and audible, with a fullness to them. My experience with synths helped in this regard. There you start with a waveform, and then apply filters to carve away at the waveform to get to where you want to be. If the original waveform is thin, you can't do much with it.

So I only concern myself with the tone in a band context, and then I merely stick with that tone for my own practice sessions.

 

[mustbampeg]

Axe-FX
Axe-FX II
Kemper

Lots of guys are using these, and they are pretty awesome.

A friend of mine, user Kaosbass actually has a Kemper. And that thing is like nothing else out there. It's unbelievable. On a whole different level from the 'modeling' amps out there.

On a side note, I think Tool probably has the best bass tone to my ears... However, I can't re create it to save my life, lol. And it probably wouldn't sit well in the mix with my projects anyways....

Randy