Honk Honk! Help me with my EQ.

[Obese Chess]

Hi all,

I play in a five-piece metal band. For sonic space I'm competing with two eight-string guitars, tuned DADGCFAD. I tune ADGCF and essentially work in the midrange rather than exclusively in the low end (though that low A is pretty nasty when I need it to be )

We are getting ready for a live show and I am cutting through the mix a tiny bit more than we would like, mostly in the form of a distinctly high-midrange "honk" sound. I don't particularly mind it either way but one guitarist is not a big fan. This is absolutely a function of the amp and cabinet, since when we run it direct through the PA the "honk" goes away (counterpoint, the PA is not particularly high quality nor geared for bass guitar so it doesn't exactly sound GOOD either).

My current setup is as follows.

I play a Dingwall NG-2 tuned as above. I run both pickups in series, with the preamp on, and my EQ almost flat - I slightly roll off the lows (70Hz) and slightly boost the mids (500Hz) and high mids (2.8kHz).

This goes into a Darkglass B7K after my tuner pedal, which is set with Blend at 2 o'clock, Level and Drive right around 12 o'clock, Low (100Hz) at 12 o'clock, low mids (1kHz) at 11 o'clock, high mids (2.8kHz) at 12 o'clock, treble (5kHz) at 10 o'clock, and "Attack" at "Boost" (this allegedly boosts high end, does not seem to impact the honkiness).

Then it goes into a compressor and finally into my amp, a Hartke HA2500. The EQ Bands I have control over here are 30 Hz, 64 Hz, 125 Hz, 250 Hz, 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz, 3
kHz, 5 kHz, and 8 kHz, and we haven't dug too much into it - I forgot to take a photo of my previous good settings before we started twiddling with the knobs yesterday. This finally goes into an aluminum-speaker Hartke 4x10, which I am aware is QUITE mid-rangey and a little honky.

So, given the settings I have control over, where should I start in trying to dial out that high-midrange honk?

Hopefully this is enough information

 

[AEVAREX]

While my input may not be entirely useful for you considering the perameters you have to work with, I'll put my two cents in anyway. Firstly I play along with two loud heavily distorted guitars mostly. And I realize honky is a perception thing to a degree. Every time I've ended up on the honkey side of things I usually find it somewhere from 630Hz to 1kHz. 90% of the time I pull 800Hz and get the result I'm looking for.

 

[winegamd]

You will be working with the 500, 1k, and 2k sliders for the honk. You can either boost 125 and 250, cut one of the freqs mentioned above, or any combination of the two.

 

[Downunderwonder]

Dialing the guitar amp bass knobs back to 10 o'clock will give you more room to sound like the bass instead of guitar3.

 

[Al Kraft]

I'm a 4 string player who uses standard tuning so take this for what it's worth...first place I go to tame bass honk is 500 Hz and you've boosted that right at the bass. Most smooth sounding scooped bass tones (which rarely have even a hint of honk) are more than few dB down with a dip across the 500-750-1000 Hz range. I'm not suggesting you go for Sans Amp BDDI on steroids, but there is a clue there to taming honk.

When I can't get the bass tone I'm after (actually this works for me on any instrument org vocals), I set everything at the no gain/no boost setting. Then I try to subtly subtract out what is hiding the tone/sound I'm looking for. It's a bit like a sculptor trying to chisel away the stone that isn't part of the statue the sculptor has in mind. The more bands of EQ control I have in front of me, the better I find this approach works.

I think in your case you may be approaching things from the standpoint of accentuating what you think you'll want to hear and odd as this sounds, I find that is rarely as effective as using EQ to subtract. Anyway, I hope some of that is helpful.

 

[Obese Chess]

Interestingly (or perhaps not) my guitarist brought his Ibanez to test along with it, which, like most Ibanez basses I've played, had an incredibly scooped tone in the mids - no honk. But on my bass, rolling off the mids the 500hz-2000hz area as advised helped a LOT, as did boosting the treble a tiny bit on the B7K (for whatever reason). Thanks, all.

I love this website.

 

[blindrabbit]

Hi all,

I play in a five-piece metal band. For sonic space I'm competing with two eight-string guitars, tuned DADGCFAD. I tune ADGCF and essentially work in the midrange rather than exclusively in the low end (though that low A is pretty nasty when I need it to be )

We are getting ready for a live show and I am cutting through the mix a tiny bit more than we would like, mostly in the form of a distinctly high-midrange "honk" sound. I don't particularly mind it either way but one guitarist is not a big fan. This is absolutely a function of the amp and cabinet, since when we run it direct through the PA the "honk" goes away (counterpoint, the PA is not particularly high quality nor geared for bass guitar so it doesn't exactly sound GOOD either).

My current setup is as follows.

I play a Dingwall NG-2 tuned as above. I run both pickups in series, with the preamp on, and my EQ almost flat - I slightly roll off the lows (70Hz) and slightly boost the mids (500Hz) and high mids (2.8kHz).

This goes into a Darkglass B7K after my tuner pedal, which is set with Blend at 2 o'clock, Level and Drive right around 12 o'clock, Low (100Hz) at 12 o'clock, low mids (1kHz) at 11 o'clock, high mids (2.8kHz) at 12 o'clock, treble (5kHz) at 10 o'clock, and "Attack" at "Boost" (this allegedly boosts high end, does not seem to impact the honkiness).

Then it goes into a compressor and finally into my amp, a Hartke HA2500. The EQ Bands I have control over here are 30 Hz, 64 Hz, 125 Hz, 250 Hz, 500 Hz, 1 kHz, 2 kHz, 3
kHz, 5 kHz, and 8 kHz, and we haven't dug too much into it - I forgot to take a photo of my previous good settings before we started twiddling with the knobs yesterday. This finally goes into an aluminum-speaker Hartke 4x10, which I am aware is QUITE mid-rangey and a little honky.

So, given the settings I have control over, where should I start in trying to dial out that high-midrange honk?

Hopefully this is enough information

First of all, you would be mistaken to assume that before doing any tweaking of any controls that you are dealing with a "flat" frequency response. All those pedals, pickups, preamps, and amps have baked-in curves inherent to their circuity. Then you've got what your speakers are deciding to put out and emphasize. There is no "flat" at the start. Recognizing that might be a big first step towards realizing what you are dealing with.

Secondly, the Darkglass pedals have a unique frequency curve to them that emphasizes the upper mids. Here is a graph of the B3K frequency response:

As you can see, you've got some serious work to do if you want to try and dial out the high mids and bring in some low mids. You might want to try an entirely different pedal in your situation. I don't know what onboard preamp you are working with either, maybe that has an upper mids emphasis too.

As for the Hartke amp and cab, you are saying yourself that a honky tone comes out of it inherently, so that's again an issue.

If it was me, I'd start with dumping the B7K as it is probably the cheapest and easiest thing to do, and replacing it with some sort of drive pedal with a better frequency profile and more control over mids and low mids...maybe a Dunwich Volt Thrower or ODB, something like that. I guess you could try to mess around more with the EQs that you have though and see if for now you can coax out a tone you want.

Best of luck with everything!

 

[Al Kraft]

First of all, you would be mistaken to assume that before doing any tweaking of any controls that you are dealing with a "flat" frequency repose. All those pedals, pickups, preamps, and amps have baked-in curves inherent to their circuity. Then you've got what your speakers are deciding to put out and emphasize. There is no "flat" at the start. Realizing that might be a big first step towards realizing what you are dealing with.

There are some real high value take-aways here IME - and they are not always immediately obvious when we're in the mode of chasing a tone or scrambling to fix poor sound at a gig.

 

[BillyH]

I'm having problems with this big time. As a drummer turned bassist, I tend to know sticks and heads much better than wires and knobs. I'm playing a Peavey Millennium with the active Cirrus electronics through a GK NEO 410 cab and GK fusion 550 head. Last night at practice I got to twisting on knobs trying to learn the amp and ended up with a tone that sounded like I had a fuzz affect on. Couldn't get it out even with the gain dialed down. Not knowing any better I'm hoping nothing's broken....bottom line is, when playing loud at gig level, I can't get a good clean fat sound. It's a rumble...

 

[Obese Chess]

First of all, you would be mistaken to assume that before doing any tweaking of any controls that you are dealing with a "flat" frequency response. All those pedals, pickups, preamps, and amps have baked-in curves inherent to their circuity. Then you've got what your speakers are deciding to put out and emphasize. There is no "flat" at the start. Recognizing that might be a big first step towards realizing what you are dealing with.

Secondly, the Darkglass pedals have a unique frequency curve to them that emphasizes the upper mids. Here is a graph of the B3K frequency response:

As you can see, you've got some serious work to do if you want to try and dial out the high mids and bring in some low mids. You might want to try an entirely different pedal in your situation. I don't know what onboard preamp you are working with either, maybe that has an upper mids emphasis too.

As for the Hartke amp and cab, you are saying yourself that a honky tone comes out of it inherently, so that's again an issue.

If it was me, I'd start with dumping the B7K as it is probably the cheapest and easiest thing to do, and replacing it with some sort of drive pedal with a better frequency profile and more control over mids and low mids...maybe a Dunwich Volt Thrower or ODB, something like that. I guess you could try to mess around more with the EQs that you have though and see if for now you can coax out a tone you want.

Best of luck with everything!

Thanks for all the info!

We were able to dial it in in a way that we were satisfied with - I actually liked the slightly "honky" profile on our record but it isn't working for our live sound as well. I may try different distortions in the future but I really like the Darkglass circuit generally and it's a big part of my sound at the moment. Playing through different amps and cabinets also greatly minimized the problematic frequencies, much more so than removing the Darkglass from my signal chain did. It's just sort of a combination of a LOT of gear that boosts specific mid frequencies and accented them a little too much, and a new cab was probably in the cards anyway since the Hartke doesn't really know how to handle the low A. It's an ongoing process, as tone always is.

 

[Downunderwonder]

I'm having problems with this big time. As a drummer turned bassist, I tend to know sticks and heads much better than wires and knobs. I'm playing a Peavey Millennium with the active Cirrus electronics through a GK NEO 410 cab and GK fusion 550 head. Last night at practice I got to twisting on knobs trying to learn the amp and ended up with a tone that sounded like I had a fuzz affect on. Couldn't get it out even with the gain dialed down. Not knowing any better I'm hoping nothing's broken....bottom line is, when playing loud at gig level, I can't get a good clean fat sound. It's a rumble...

fuzz still there with gain down = broken, or flat battery in your bass.

Sounds like you are suffering from everything louder than everything else syndrome. Typically this begins with the guitarists and they blame the drummer.

 

[Downunderwonder]

Note ninja edit.

 

[walterw]

I'm playing a Peavey Millennium with the active Cirrus electronics through a GK NEO 410 cab and GK fusion 550 head. Last night at practice I got to twisting on knobs trying to learn the amp and ended up with a tone that sounded like I had a fuzz affect on.

bass volume dimed, all EQ knobs (amp and bass) to noon, all amp preamp gain knobs way down, master volume up.

start from there, taking care to not crank the preamp gain too much or turn any of the EQ knobs all the way up or down.

 

[walterw]

two eight-string guitars, tuned DADGCFAD

where is that on the spectrum?

is the second "D" the normal dropped D of a six-string, so they have essentially two strings lower than a normal guitar?

if so than the bottom D is the same pitch as a 4-string bass with it's E dropped to D. no way that actually sounds clear on a guitar, even an extended-scale guitar.

you're fighting a wall of rumbly mush that's totally crashing into your sonic turf, and my condolences. "good tone" might be out the window, if you can get an EQ setup that lets you hear your own notes that might be all you can hope for.

 

[BillyH]

bass volume dimed, all EQ knobs (amp and bass) to noon, all amp preamp gain knobs way down, master volume up.

start from there, taking care to not crank the preamp gain too much or turn any of the EQ knobs all the way up or down.

Thanks Mucho sir!!!!

 

[Obese Chess]

where is that on the spectrum?

is the second "D" the normal dropped D of a six-string, so they have essentially two strings lower than a normal guitar?

if so than the bottom D is the same pitch as a 4-string bass with it's E dropped to D. no way that actually sounds clear on a guitar, even an extended-scale guitar.

you're fighting a wall of rumbly mush that's totally crashing into your sonic turf, and my condolences. "good tone" might be out the window, if you can get an EQ setup that lets you hear your own notes that might be all you can hope for.

Correct. There's overlap in our sonic spectrum - my "A" is lower, my "D" is the same octave as their lowest string, and then my G, C, F are an octave below their respective G, C, F.

We think it actually sounds pretty good, all things considered. It took a lot of fiddlin' to figure out how to EQ everything, and even what for me to tune to, but once we nailed it we were pretty happy with the results: