Volume and tone either 0 or 1
Straightforward approach. I might be happy with a three position switch
V0
T1V1
T0V1
Straightforward approach. I might be happy with a three position switch
V0
T1V1
T0V1
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Do you run your bass' volume control wide open?
- Thread starter Bob Coldwell
- Start date
I usually play active basses, especially in more dynamic settings.
Set my usual/loudest sound with the volume all the way up. If there needs to be times when I turn down, the active circuit still sounds good.
There is always give and take with passive basses, they can get muddy when turned down a little. Install a treble bleed, but that can often be too bright when turned down. It takes a lot of experimentation to find a good treble bleed for each bass.
Set my usual/loudest sound with the volume all the way up. If there needs to be times when I turn down, the active circuit still sounds good.
There is always give and take with passive basses, they can get muddy when turned down a little. Install a treble bleed, but that can often be too bright when turned down. It takes a lot of experimentation to find a good treble bleed for each bass.
I start my sets with on board volume about 60 - 70%, so we can ease into full volume collectively. After the 4th or 5th song, I'm all the way up....except with my G&L L-2500, which i run at about 95%
It affects the tone if you back the volume off. So it’s not simple a volume control like it might be on a stereo system, for example.
The Joe Dart is a real missed opportunity. Why have a single volume knob. Just have no knobs, it would be such a better product. As we can see here, most people don't use the volume knob they have on their various basses.
Others, like me, never turn the volume on their bass fully up, so the tone does not get overly bright.
On my ‘60s style Jazz Bass, I prefer neck 90%, bridge and tone 0-50%, most probably not the tone OP is aiming for.
The bass nerds over at SBL made a video about this recently. If the timestamp is not working: it starts around 16:00.
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A practical solution would be a volume pedal. A good quality one which has a smooth but heavy action means you can’t knock it easily by accident.
One thing I do is play with a light touch on the strings. I have my master set so that with a light touch, everything sounds at a good level. Then, if I need more volume, I just pluck the string harder. If I need my bass to actually growl, then I'll really dig into the strings over my bridge pickup and it will growl all night long. But playing at "normal levels" with a light touch allows me to both go a bit quieter by plucking the strings even more lightly if I need to, as well as play louder by just plucking the strings harder.
Another thing that I would recommend for you whether you are using a passive or an active bass and that is to run a little boost in your low-mids on your amp anywhere between 250Hz and 500/550Hz. When playing in a group, the bass lives in the low-mids because the kick drum owns the low bass frequencies and the guitars and keys own the high-mids and highs. With my Jazz Bass and Eden or DNA amps (both generate very clear, clean sounds), I'll boost my low-mids to 1:30. It usually doesn't take a lot but if you boost it too much, your sound will honk at you. So just slowly turn it down until the honk goes away. That little boost in the low-mids gives your bass both presence and definition in the mix with a live group. That actually might go a long way to solving your problem with losing your edge and presence with lower volumes.
Other than that low-mid boost, it depends on whether your Bass is a passive or active bass. I have a passive Jazz and I run both volume knobs all the way up plus the tone knob all the way up. That passive bass has Fender's Grease Pot controls and all they do is cut the signal to your amp when you turn any of it down, making the signal weaker. There's no such thing as boosting the neck pickup or the bridge pickup; all you can do is cut the signal. So certainly, when you turn the volume down you lose some of the liveliness in your resulting sound.
I also have an active bass, a 5-string that I only use when I need to access the notes on the B string. It will play in either active or passive modes but can only boost or cut the bass and treble EQ's in active mode. With an active bass, if you turn the volume down, you can sometimes get that life back in your sound by boosting the bass and/or treble EQ. You have to be a little careful with how much you boost them though or you may actually get your volume back up close to what it was before you reduced the volume because boosting the EQ's on an active system also raises the level of your sound.
If I play it in passive mode, the EQ knobs don't work at all because they are on an active circuit that is being bypassed. Good news for me was that the volume AND the pickup blend still work in passive mode and I can adjust the balance of sound between the neck pickup and bridge pickup to adjust the tone. I often do that because I can get a decent sound out of it in passive mode without needing to go over to my amp to push in the pad button to drop the signal by 10db and then adjust the gain control. Active basses send a hotter signal to the amp so the gain needs to be set considerably lower when in active mode than in passive mode. If you are only using an active bass, then you set the gain once and repeat that setting whenever you're playing that active bass.
Hope that helps.
15-20% dial back tone knob on P bass just sound great which has alnico V pickup inside.
Dimarzio Model P are another story, I prefer use A500K or 1 meg volume pot to open up the sound and sure 100% up on tone knob. She just KICK !!!
Custom wound overwound single coil Jazz bass pickup set on my J bass has no tone control, just Volume/volume (250K pot). Love this setup which has nice polish J vibe i liking with!
Dimarzio Model P are another story, I prefer use A500K or 1 meg volume pot to open up the sound and sure 100% up on tone knob. She just KICK !!!
Custom wound overwound single coil Jazz bass pickup set on my J bass has no tone control, just Volume/volume (250K pot). Love this setup which has nice polish J vibe i liking with!
On my single pickup basses (all passive), volume all the way up is my default setting. However, if I need to turn down (beyond simply playing more softly within my normal comfortable hand technique range) and the amp isn’t handy to turn down on, I’ll turn the bass’s volume knob down. It does affect tone, but idealized tone might not be the most critical thing at the moment.
Adding a passive volume pedal could be a way to lower (or raise) volume. Simply having it in line will dull tone a bit, as will lowering the volume via the passive volume pedal (it’s basically just like the volume knob on your bass, has the same effects, but it’s on the floor accessed by foot), but, that said, the tone change isn’t the end of the world, if you even notice it. Kind of more of a bedroom (or recording) issue.
For my two pickup VVT basses (I’ve had 3 until just recently, but now I only have 1 remaining two-pickup bass), I rarely have both volumes full up. I’ll often run the neck pickup only and full up, or otherwise I use various blends of each pickup’s volume to get the desired sound. Besides my main setting of Neck 10, Bridge 0, I also often use Neck 10 and bridge cracked open a bit. An interesting combination is Neck turned down a hair (8 or 9 ish, I guess — I just go by ear) and Bridge 10, with tone down somewhat… And, well, then there’s all the various other combinations. A volume pedal could act as a master volume here, though I don’t use one.
An active volume pedal or one with buffered bypass might be something to look into, but my volume pedal (which I don’t regularly use, but sometimes…) is just a passive one.
A clean boost pedal or simple preamp-type pedal could give you two volume ranges (without touching any knobs), one with the pedal off and the other with the pedal engaged.
Could wire your passive bass for a master volume…
I don’t know much about active basses (I’ve played them a bit but have never owned one), so my comments don’t necessarily apply smoothly to them
Adding a passive volume pedal could be a way to lower (or raise) volume. Simply having it in line will dull tone a bit, as will lowering the volume via the passive volume pedal (it’s basically just like the volume knob on your bass, has the same effects, but it’s on the floor accessed by foot), but, that said, the tone change isn’t the end of the world, if you even notice it. Kind of more of a bedroom (or recording) issue.
For my two pickup VVT basses (I’ve had 3 until just recently, but now I only have 1 remaining two-pickup bass), I rarely have both volumes full up. I’ll often run the neck pickup only and full up, or otherwise I use various blends of each pickup’s volume to get the desired sound. Besides my main setting of Neck 10, Bridge 0, I also often use Neck 10 and bridge cracked open a bit. An interesting combination is Neck turned down a hair (8 or 9 ish, I guess — I just go by ear) and Bridge 10, with tone down somewhat… And, well, then there’s all the various other combinations. A volume pedal could act as a master volume here, though I don’t use one.
An active volume pedal or one with buffered bypass might be something to look into, but my volume pedal (which I don’t regularly use, but sometimes…) is just a passive one.
A clean boost pedal or simple preamp-type pedal could give you two volume ranges (without touching any knobs), one with the pedal off and the other with the pedal engaged.
Could wire your passive bass for a master volume…
I don’t know much about active basses (I’ve played them a bit but have never owned one), so my comments don’t necessarily apply smoothly to them
That’s why basses have controls, so they can be adjusted.
I set my volume between 50% and 75% on gigs so I can turn up or down without going back to the amp. The only time I dime the volume is when recording.
I've always had volume fully open until I recently bought a stock Fender Jazz Deluxe FMT. The output is so hot that I'd have a hard time re doing all my pedalboard settings when switching between that and my other bass. So I keep the volume around 30-40% and I haven't noticed any tone loss.
