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Flat EQ on Bass and Amp

#4
I'm all about doing my signal processing on my pedal board, complete with programmable EQ to accommodate different playing techniques. But... I find that my amp, cabs and bass together lean heavily toward the high end. So my amp's EQ ends up looking like this: bass noon, low mids 1:30, high mids 10, highs 9. So you can see I'm kind of tilting the EQ back toward lower frequencies and cutting out quite a bit of highs. This gives me a fairly flat sound to my ears for bass guitar.

Then I use my board's EQ to a) dial in a less burpy fingerstyle, dropping off a bit of the ultra lows and scooping out some of the 500k mids, b) giving me a smile EQ suitable for slap, and c) giving me a special effect which helps to emulate a low fi sample of fretless bass for a cover we do.

If I didn't aggressively EQ the amp in the first place I think my pedal EQ would have way more drastic settings.
 
#5
I'm somewhat confused by the original question. Are you saying that you prefer amps that don't require much EQing to sound good or are you saying that you prefer the bass to sound "flat" in the room (i.e., the bass is balanced throughout its audible frequency spectrum), regardless of actual EQ setting?
 
#6
LiquidMidnight said:
I'm somewhat confused by the original question. Are you saying that you prefer amps that don't require much EQing to sound good or are you saying that you prefer the bass to sound "flat" in the room (i.e., the bass is balanced throughout its audible frequency spectrum), regardless of actual EQ setting?
Click to expand...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of musicians out there that don't have to adjust their amp to get a good slap tone, or a good fingerstyle tone, or a good solo tone. A lot of what they use is play more towards the neck or more towards the bridge or alter their techniques in other way.

I've been exploring this for a while and just recently found that I can "finally" get the slap tone that I was looking for without having to do a mid scoop. (Granted, part of that was changing amps and cabs... but that's a different story...)
 
#7
Acoustic356 said:
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are a lot of musicians out there that don't have to adjust their amp to get a good slap tone, or a good fingerstyle tone, or a good solo tone. A lot of what they use is play more towards the neck or more towards the bridge or alter their techniques in other way.

I've been exploring this for a while and just recently found that I can "finally" get the slap tone that I was looking for without having to do a mid scoop. (Granted, part of that was changing amps and cabs... but that's a different story...)
Click to expand...

There has been some discussion about this before, but the scoop for a good slap tone sounds best when it's just a very narrow cut in the high-mids - somewhere around 1.2 to 1.5k - to get rid of the overbearing gank. I find that to be true as well. There should be as much clarity with your slap sound as there is with your finger or pick sound. Listen to Flea or Victor Wooten when they slap; there's still plenty of mid punch in their sound. I never thought a smiley-faced EQ sounded good, even for slap playing. The narrow high-mid cut should also sound great for finger and pick playing.
 
#8
If I'm not digging the sound with all knobs nooned (that setting is usually not flat with heads and it's pretty much never flat with cabs, so I don't call it "setting the amp flat"), I am not going to sit there helplessly while my tone sucks. It's a good place to start with an amp, but it's almost never where I finish.
 
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#9
Only if it is a amp I have never played I start at the flat setting and adjust to my liking but, live my settings are changed to the acoustics of the room I keep a photo log on my cellphone that has amp settings per club and sometimes that has to be tweaked depending on certain conditions. In fact I have one room l play in and it only sounds good with bass -15db Mid -15d and treble 9 o'clock anything other settings I tried just didn't work
 
#10
I play through a lot of house amps, its just the name of the game where I am, and have always hoped to be in a situation where i can run a flat EQ and use a pre set EQ / pre amp pedal to achieve the sound I want. Never works. All of the amps are different and even when the Hartke favourite is used venues use different cab configurations and I find I'm always tweaking the EQ to get it somewhere in the ballpark that I want.

The only way I can see myself being able to keep a totally flat EQ (I really only tweak the bass up a little and accept the rig for what it is) I'd need to DI into the PA, but smaller venues around the city thats just isn't the done thing.
 

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