How were you using gear WRONG as a noob?

[Nebadon2000]

My first gig was a small bar in LI; I had a Peavey 200 watt tube head and EV 18" folded Horn Cab.

I had no idea that cab design was to throw bass out distances. So when setting volume on stage had to crank somewhat.

We opened with 'The Real Me' by The Who after staring at fret board to get intro right; I looked up and saw most customers all the way back to entry door or outside and bartenders trying to catch bottles falling off shelf

Of course adding Ampeg 8x10 [along with trading for SVT] was solution for balancing stage and Club volume.

 

[drpepper]

oldie but a goodie

 

[lyonaudio]

I remember working hard and saving money as a teen to buy my first bass rig. I got a used SWR Goliath 410 that didn’t fit in the front seat of my old Camaro… UNTIL I MADE IT FIT!!! Completely trashed my interior. That cab weighed a ton. Or roughly 100 lbs to be exact.

I also bought a used SWR Bass 350 or Basic 350 or whatever it was called. The one with the red face. Anyway, I ran it with the “Aural Enhancer” contour all the way up, and a complete smiley face scooped EQ on both my amp AND my Ibanez SR’s active EQ. No mids. Fieldy didn’t need mids and neither did I!

…until my amp would struggle in the mix, overheat, and then shut down. Over and Over. If I could go back in time and slap that kid I would!

Do you guys have any similar stories of “doing it wrong”? These new guys now are lucky to have access to all this knowledge at the click of a mouse.

Why is your obvious mistake ("...I ran it with the “Aural Enhancer” contour all the way up, and a complete smiley face scooped EQ on both my amp AND my Ibanez SR’s active EQ. No mids...") a problem for someone else?
Who does that?
Your first mistake was not buying a Precision and a basic bass amp and running with that for a while.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

My first real bass was a Steinberger XM-2TT that I saved up forever. Almost cried when I saw that the neck had bowed from leaning it against the wall, or so I thought. That’s called “relief” I learned later. Just recently I learned that harmonics are the same pitch as if you played the say, 5th fret and instead of plucking normally where you pluck, pluck on the nut side of the 5 the fret. I didn’t know.

 

[Al Kraft]

I placed too much importance on fundamental note frequencies without appreciating the contribution of harmonics to the sound and I thought that hearing what I liked on stage was the same as contributing the best bass sound to the overall audience mix....needless to say this led to using my EQ in a manner that often hurt rather than enhanced my contribution to the band's sound. I listened to more experienced and knowledgeable players and sound techs and I learned.

 

[jchrisk1]

Funny, I had the same problem with my SWR Bass 350.
I remember my first kid had just been born, I was just a kid myself at 20 years old, and I thought I'd better get a good amp while I still can. The Bass 350 had just come out and I saved up a lot of dough to get it, at least it was a lot for me at the time.
I was so happy until I started playing through it. My first thought was, " I can't believe I just spent so much money on this POS!" I got rid of it within a couple of months, but had I known then what I know now... I didn't know anything about EQ, and I damn sure didn't know what an aural enhancer was. "Maybe I need to turn everything up so I can hear it?" Which is exactly what I did, obviously now, making it way worse.

 

[micguy]

26490407[/URL], member: 150265"]

oldie but a goodie

Marshall’s are loud enough that there’s probably a decent amount of signal there. I once played with a guitarist who dialed up the brightest tone you can imagine from his Marshall; that position might have even sounded good on his rig.

 

[Pings Bass]

I ran a power amp bridged into a 4 ohm speaker at a gig. Clipped hard and blew the driver in short order.

 

[PennyroyalWe]

Not bass but when I started drumming as a kid, my Dad gave me his old kit, but forgot to give me a bass drum pedal… I taught myself to play along to songs, and somehow made it work playing the floor tom as the kick drum parts. I genuinely believed the bass drum was just there to hold the other drums up, and somewhere to put the bands logo!

I got totally found out at a first band rehearsal when the guitarist turned around and said “what are you doing? Why aren’t you playing the bass drum?” - yeah that was awkward.

My first bass was a handmedown fretless Peavey foundation. Eventually I was playing with a guitarist who was checking it out and noted the fretless, and I insisted ALL basses are fretless. They were not gentle in letting me know I was wrong. 7th graders are brutal hahaha.

 

[sotua]

For a long time I was:
- using my active bass controls dimed all the time
- not properly understanding gain vs master on my first amp, leading to either minimum gain and wide open master or viceversa.
- smiley eq

And the most embarrassing of all:
- I thought that to tune a bass, you went from the guitar 6th to the bass 1st string. So we'd tune the 1st string 5th fret of the bass to the open low E on the guitar and go from there. So I wound up with the bass tuned to... BF#C#G#. And then wondered *** what I'm doing doesn't match anything bassists I see on tv are doing. Fortunately this one was corrected very, very fast.

 

[ladybug]

Ran my GK 800RB with a 8ohm and 4ohm cab... Worked for a while but eventually kept shutting down . Definitely used speaker and instrument cables interchangeably.

 

[johnnynitro]

I did it all wrong for many years. Saw a band once were the bass player had the same rig. His sounded great. Got talking with him. Asked about his EQ. He showed me. (Was flat all across). Looked at me like I should have known this. Had a few arguments with band members over the years about how muddy my bass was. Should have listened!!

 

[Deleted member 271037]

Using far too much lows. Bass is 90% about the mids. Especially when recording. It took me far too long to realize this.

 

[DirtDog]

Everything dimed.

 

[TheBassPreacher]

I didn't use my gear wrong as a noob because I was a member of TalkBass shortly after I began playing and learned what to do and what not to do.

 

[bassfiddlesteve]

My first bass amplifier (Unicord Stage 252) had the words Pull Brite printed above the volume control. After I had been playing for a while I confessed to someone that I didn't know what it meant.

"Why don't you try pulling out the knob?"

WOW! Treble!

- Steve

 

[maxschrek]

My entire first year of playing I held my bass entirely wrong, as pictured below:

 

[6-3-2]

I had no idea how EQ worked in my early days. I'd just move sliders around and vibe.

 

[Texican]

Why is your obvious mistake ("...I ran it with the “Aural Enhancer” contour all the way up, and a complete smiley face scooped EQ on both my amp AND my Ibanez SR’s active EQ. No mids...") a problem for someone else?
Who does that?
Your first mistake was not buying a Precision and a basic bass amp and running with that for a while.

I don’t know what you trying to say with the first part of your post. Sorry if I’m missing something.

For the second part, I actually did start with a P bass (actually a pointy head Jackson with a P/J setup) and a Peavey 115 combo. It sounded throaty and meaty and always worked well. But I thought the new setup would be better and make me “more pro” lol. Lesson learned. Additionally, the J pickup was very noisy and I thought the entire bass had a grounding problem. Part of why I replaced it. Now I play P basses with flats. Go figure.

 

[BassinCT]

Early 1990’s: expecting a 115, 50w combo amp to be adequate for loud gigs in large rooms. I discovered the limitations when playing with a collegiate athletic band at a loud conference basketball tournament, I upgraded the following week.