Help me understand what "tone" is when applied to bass..

[AndyMopley]

I've come across a few occasions where people have talked about "tone" when playing bass. Whilst at the most basic level I can relate to the term in as much as treble and/or bass are concerned (not withstanding other factors like strings, instrument, technique etc.), I am sometime in a quandry as to how much time I should spend on finding what "sounds right". Of course, even this may be a temporary thing, depending on the genre played, for example, or even the recording techniques, if you are this lucky.

I generally have devoted little time to this aspect, just a tweak or two tops. But out of curiosity, do you invest some serious thinking / time in how you sound (note not in a techinique sort of way), are you anchored to any specfic settings? Is tone nothing more than the sound that feels right to you ears, what people would recognize you by?

Regards to all

 

[Wasnex]

Tone relates significantly to frequency bandwidth and contour. It also relates to the shape of the dynamic envelope.

This image is a good visualization:

This represents F1 played on a fretless bass. In particular, note that the dynamic envelope varies across different elements of a tone.

Ref: https://www.talkbass.com/threads/ba...s-what-they-mean-to-rigs.510749/#post-6885498

If you are using amplification and possibly effects, tone could also be related to the way circuits overload and transition into distortion.

Hopefully you get the idea the answer to your question is complex and nuanced...AFAIK my comments just scratch the surface.

 

[Wood and Wire]

How well do you think Lemmy's tone would fit any Motown record?

How well do you think Jamerson's tone would fit any Motörhead record?

 

[AndyMopley]

Appreciate the responses, thank you.
On reflection, just as you can recognise a singer's voice instantly, tone is a bassist's primary differentiator. Hence I assume that, in addition to the graph supplied (thank you Wasnex) the right tone ensures listeners hear the actual notes played rather than just a muddy rumble.
In a way, tone is our voice, in the band. Time to pay more attention to this.

 

[Les Fret]

Tone is the sound that you have in your head that you want to get out of your instrument. It’s not specific to bass. It’s a very personal thing and has to do with technique and feel, not only gear. Gear is probably the least important factor. So what tone do you want to get out of your bass? You have to ask yourself.

 

[Wood and Wire]

just as you can recognise a singer's voice instantly

Furthermore, just as you can recognise someone's voice, you can instantly pickup on their intentions / mood by their tone of voice (happy / sad / angry / laidback / sexy / scary - none of which has anything to do with EQ, but is crucial to the overall tone, and attitude of the piece).

 

[Krakmann]

How well do you think Lemmy's tone would fit any Motown record?

How well do you think Jamerson's tone would fit any Motörhead record?

This is basically it for me.

In a more basic level, do you like the sound you hear from your amp? If you like it and you hear yourself and your bandmates and sound person don't complain, it's ok. I like my bass through some type of preamp/amp simulator, but I don't think too much about it once I find something that sounds good. If it doesn't sound dull and I hear myself and nobody complains, it's ok.

 

[andare]

Tone is whatever is mostly not in the hands.
It's in your head first, mostly in the gear later.
Especially if you play with a pick.

If you can't hear it in your head, you'll never hear it coming out of your amp. So no one can tell you what you tone should be.

 

[ardgedee]

But out of curiosity, do you invest some serious thinking / time in how you sound (note not in a techinique sort of way), are you anchored to any specfic settings?

I know that people like to say "tone is in the fingers" here. It gets trotted out more often than necessary maybe, but it shouldn't be ignored either. Geddy Lee is going to sound more like Geddy Lee on your rig than you will be able to sound like him on his.

Technique isn't just a matter of how fast and nimbly you can play, it's the fretting pressure, finger or pick technique, clarity with which you move between notes, choices in where on the string you pick, and so on, and all of these have strong influences on tone, not just in the sense that picking closer to the bridge puts more treble in the tone, but how that affects any pedals you might use -- for example it might make it harder for an octaver to discern a note which affects how that sounds, or it might mean a sharper attack and quicker decay which affects the compressor's behavior, and so on.

It's not just your choices in equipment, it's how you use the equipment, and what kind of sounds you're feeding that equipment. It's why we all like different gear -- not only because certain genres favor certain equipment, but because that equipment responds to how we play.

 

[DJ Bebop]

How well do you think Lemmy's tone would fit any Motown record?

How well do you think Jamerson's tone would fit any Motörhead record?

Appreciate the responses, thank you.
On reflection, just as you can recognise a singer's voice instantly, tone is a bassist's primary differentiator. Hence I assume that, in addition to the graph supplied (thank you Wasnex) the right tone ensures listeners hear the actual notes played rather than just a muddy rumble.
In a way, tone is our voice, in the band. Time to pay more attention to this.

For me, while tone is sometimes looked at like Wasnex post. I think it is also looked at, like Wood and Wire indicate and you latched on to, consider it our voice and all that entails. If you use flat s vs round wound strings. If you like overdrive vs a clean sound, frets vs fretless, opera or dub ✌You know that.

How you develop it can come from early on listening to styles and sounds that draw you in and maybe mimicking some of your favorites early on, eventually falling into your own thing. That’s how I got hooked in.

It is the bane of my existencI

 

[Lo-E]

Just to throw more seasoning in the mix, consider what you said about our tone being our specific voice and then consider that our voices change gradually over time - so it is, too, with our tone.

For me, the “ideal” bass tone has changed considerably since the time I started playing and that change was very gradual. My speaking voice has also changed a lot since the time I started playing bass, both in timbre and inflection. I think everyone undergoes these subtle, gradual changes both in the way they speak and in the way they sound when they play their instrument.

It’s a moving target.

 

[JonathanPDX]

You can think of tone on a bass the same way you'd apply the question of tone to a human voice (Prosody.)

Timbre, inflection, timing, accent, etc. You could also include factors like language, word choice, slang, and a million other little details that make each person's speaking voice unique, not just in the actual sound, but the qualities that come with it. Just like you know people who have a go-to phrase or favorite joke, musicians all have their go-to licks and favorite ways to phrase passages.

In the purely mechanical sense, tone is going to be the combination of all the physics that goes into making the string vibrate and the amplifier produce a tone from it, but in practice it's going to include the entirety of one's musical language, vocabulary, and culture.

 

[FullumMusic]

Tone just means a sound "Has Harmonics."

- A pure sine wave is a pure note. It has no harmonics. It has no tone. It's just that one frequency.

- The moment any harmonics are present, that note has tone. In general we're talking about harmonics in the harmonic series. Harmonic partials occur at predictable frequency ratios up the spectrum.

- How that tone sounds depends on a few things: Which harmonics are present, and how much of each harmonic exists. That's why a clarinet sounds like a clarinet and a tuba sounds like a tuba. They have different harmonics present at different levels.

So, for example, a Square Wave's tone is an infinite series of odd harmonics: Fundamental, 3rd, 5th, 7th, etc. all the way up. And each harmonic's amplitude decreases proportionally to its harmonic number 1/n. So the third would be the amplitude of the fundamental times 1/3.

A Saw Wave's tone is an infinite series of every harmonic, with the harmonic's amplitude decreasing proportionally to its harmonic number 1/n.

You can create either Square Wave or Saw Wave with enough Sine waves at their harmonic values, with the correct level ratio.

What does this mean in terms of Bass? Kinda the same as it means in terms of any other instrument. The tone of a bass is just how much of what harmonics exist when you play a note. That's it. All the talk of "good tone" and "bad tone" is all subjective. Tone is just a descriptive term. There's no such thing as good tone or bad tone. Tone is subjective; tone is contextual.

Does it sound good to you when you play your bass in isolation? Then it's good. When you play in a group or a mix of other instruments, does the mix sound good? Then it's good. Does the mix sound bad? Adjust your tone (aka adjust the amount of different harmonics present in your signal to fit better in the mix. Also, ideally, the other electric & electronic instruments should be adjusting their tone to the arrangement, instrumentation, and mix as well, but that's another discussion.)

I generally have devoted little time to this aspect, just a tweak or two tops

You're doing it right. And i'm saying that as a sound engineer, not a bassist.

Doing too much with tone is worse than doing too little. And generally, when you get into a mix, simple, broad stroke adjustments are better than dozens of surgical ones. The surgical fine tuning is really only useful in the studio, after the recording is done, and an incredibly unique and weird set of circumstances show up in the mixing phase, that probably should have been addressed in the recording/tracking phase, but it's too late because that's already done and you can't go back and re-track.

From my engineering perspective as a bass player i generally treat tone like this:
- Plug in and leave everything "flat"
- Play.
- Does it sound good?
- If not, adjust. (And the adjustment might only be a slight tweak. Great gear gives us a lot of options and flexibility. But we don't need to use every feature all the time. Not every knob needs to be twisted. A great adjustment might be adjusting one fader on a 12 band EQ +/-3dB. Maybe it's just a slight bump on the Amp's EQ. Maybe i'm hitting the first two LEDs of GR on my compressor. Hell, in the studio, sometimes i've run a channel through a piece of gear like an SSL channel strip and adjusted none of the knobs because it just sounded good running it through the gear as-is.)

 

[MtManiac]

Tone and timbre often get confused. Or maybe it’s just me.

I don’t claim to be an expert, but my understanding is:

Tone is what you adjust with a passive tone knob. The attenuation of highs, or not.

Timbre on the other hand is what differentiates one instrument from another when played at the same pitch. This differentiation is the result of, at its most basic, what harmonic frequencies and disharmonic frequencies accompany the fundamental. However, each frequency in this “envelope” can be affected differently in amplitude or volume as well as decay/sustain, depending on how the note is attacked (eg different types of picks, your index finger versus your middle finger versus my fingers, slapping, other techniques), and what frequency filters or boosts exist in the signal chain (could be strings, pickups, pots, caps, cables, pedals, preamp, power amp, speakers, cab design, recording desk, etc).

For example, a 0.88 pick striking the string has a high amplitude of multiple higher end harmonic/disharmonic frequencies at the beginning of the note, which rapidly decay while the fundamental and lower frequency harmonics sustain. Striking the string with the pad of your finger provides an initial amplitude/volume swell of the lower frequencies which decay different, but it sounds like a “softer” attack because of the lower relative volume or attenuation of the higher frequencies. Different strings will vibrate differently, and some relative frequencies will be attenuated or amplified accordingly.

[I’m using amplitude and volume interchangeably, I know that’s incorrect, but I don’t know the difference. Apologies to aspiring and practicing engineers and physicists.]

TL; DR: The frequency of a given note would be just a sine wave, a long clean beep or hum. It is the addition of the harmonic and disharmonic frequencies as well as their relative volume and sustain/decay that gives you what we often call tone but is actually timbre.

Edit: I’ve since read that amplitude is an objective measurement of loudness, whereas volume is a subjective perceived level of loudness.

 

[viobass]

Appreciate the responses, thank you.
On reflection, just as you can recognise a singer's voice instantly, tone is a bassist's primary differentiator. Hence I assume that, in addition to the graph supplied (thank you Wasnex) the right tone ensures listeners hear the actual notes played rather than just a muddy rumble.
In a way, tone is our voice, in the band. Time to pay more attention to this.

Oh no! Welcome to the world of tone chasing. Remember to actually practice your instrument once in a while instead of twiddling knobs. And have someone hide your credit card.

 

[InhumanResource]

How well do you think Lemmy's tone would fit any Motown record?

How well do you think Jamerson's tone would fit any Motörhead record?

Hot take, I bet they blog would be awesome. Someone should do it.

 

[brianrost]

do you invest some serious thinking / time in how you sound (note not in a techinique sort of way), are you anchored to any specfic settings?

I pick up a bass, play it, do I like the way it sounds? That’s about it for me. If I have to struggle to get a sound I like, then it’s not for me.

As far as specific settings, for live it’s mostly about the room. Otherwise, I use the same settings on both the bass and the amp. For recording, I use a DI all the time, so open the volume and passive tone controls up all the way, for active EQ set it for no boost or cut. Let the engineer do the tweaking.

Is tone nothing more than the sound that feels right to your ears, what people would recognize you by?

For me, that’s all it is. I don't know if anyone recognizes my sound, audience members seem to be more interested in how the bass looks than how it sounds

 

[Ostie]

Certain pickup types produce characteristic tones. Precision, Jazz, Humbucker, Rickenbacker, etc. Scale length also contributes. Wood species used in bodies and necks. Solid body versus hollow body. String type. They all contribute to the tonal palette. Then there’s the intangible element that the player imparts. Sone players just have really great tone.

 

[micguy]

I spent an entire career designing pro audio equipment. From all that work; understanding all the things that make those things work well and sound good, I have applied that knowledge (plus a lot of Acoustical Physics knowledge - I studied the Physics of musical instruments in college) to understanding how bass guitars work, and how to make them sound good - I've built a few dozen basses, many of which I've rewired with different circuits multiple times. Net result is I have more than a hundred experiments that I've run correlating what I hear to the results I get from simulations involving electronics, pickup positions, etc.

Add to that the over 10,000 hours trying to learn and get a decent sound out of the instrument, and yes, I have spent considerable time pondering how to get a good tone out of a bass guitar.

I will admit I am unusual. But yes, I do get compliments on my tone from the folks I play with, and people often ask me to help make their instruments sound better.

One note on effects and such: I do use them (I always have a pedalboard on any gig), but I have gotten a few compliments where folks told me that my pedalboard produced a really good tone, where....nothing but a buffer and a DI was active in the signal chain. When that happens, I smile....and say thanks.

 

[MCS4]

This is the same as asking how much time you should spend thinking about or working on time, rhythm, feel, plucking/picking technique, harmony/theory, learning tunes, or any of the other myriad of aspects of playing bass. There is no real answer that is universally applicable to everyone. All that really matters at the end of the day is if you get a sound you like and that works for your playing situation.