GK head and active bass

[Killing Floor]

I don't have your head/speakers so grain of salt.

I have several EBMM basses that are active in in my experience compered to my Fender passive basses they aren't really hot output. I have a couple very powerful basses with John East preamps that I must use the lower input on my amp but same input, same settings my Ray or Sabre basses with clean battery is really similar level out as my passive P.

All that said to +1 that maybe you're striking the strings to the poles.

Also, let's be honest, you probably have really bright rounds on the Ray unless you are an evil villain. So you need to be mindful that they are bright basses with bright strings and bright by design pickups and preamp.

Good luck.

 

[Kro]

What StingRay specifically are you using @ted schardt ? Is it a SUB by any chance?

As noted just above, with its pickup wired parallel, usually Stingrays will be less hot than other basses, even passive ones with pickups wired in series.

 

[erratick]

Input PAD? Or not? How hot is the active bass?

 

[Wasnex]

I bi-amped my GK and although I didn't turn the tweeter amp all the way up, it sounded great to me at a little less than halfway up, and I played a very articulate Spector Euro through it (Aguilar pre-amp). The whole point of it was keeping highs clean when turning up the grind, which is a good reason for it IMO. Popping and slapping means turning it up higher, along with the bass knob while scooping out the mids. I'm not good at the technique but I've seen great poppin-slappers sound mint through a GK in bi-amp mode.

I think part of the issue is the horn tweeters are more efficient than the woofers. If I plug in a CD player and adjust for relatively flat response, I wind up running the woofer master 2 to 3 clock face settings higher than the tweeter master.

Normally I set up the tweeter more to broaden horizontal dispersion than to add brightness. The idea is the woofer will begin to get beamy near the top of it's response, but the tweeter should have about a 60 degree dispersion pattern. So I turn up the tweeter so I can barely hear it on axis. Off axis it's more noticeable because the high response of the woofer drops and the tweeter fills in the gap.

My finger style playing is generally pretty clean and free of fret noise, soo I don't tend to make a lot of sounds that reach up into the tweeter's response unless I want to. FYI, the tweeter has a 5khz HPF running all the time. The woofer can be run full range or you can engage a 5khz LPF. However, I don't think the 12" in my 700RB/112 combo has a lot of response up to, or beyond 5khz. Toggling the Woofer X-Over or Hi-Cut only makes a slight difference in the sound. I think I prefer letting the woofer run full range as engaging the LPF seems to cause a bit of phase cancellation in the upper mids.

 

[mouthmw]

Again with the old "Stingrays are active basses and therefore have a hot output". It's not true. Stingrays are on par with passive basses output wise unless you crank the eq. I absolutely never use the db pad button on my GK 2001RB because it's essentially a "suck button" unless your bass output is ridiculously hot. Just check your setup and if you're hitting the pole pieces with the strings, and check your eq.