How were you using gear WRONG as a noob?

[rwkeating]

I should have spent time making the bass and amp sound as good as they could. Instead, I tried to make them produce a sound that they couldn't. Example: why can't I get my cheap Hofner bass copy with flat wounds through a bass amp with limited high frequency capabilities to sound like Chris Squire's Ric? I don't know, but I'm sure if I keep trying .... duh.

 

[Low Down Brown]

Like a several others have already metioned, TOO MUCH EQ - crankin' the bass, scooping the mids, and rolling off all the highs on the EQ and the tone knob on the bass. I started out playing gigs at 14 with guys who were in their 30's - 60's. One of the best guitarists I ever worked with also played bass from time to time. He had toured with a few different folks throughout his career and had a lot of studio experience. He told me once that, "flatter is fatter." Of course, me being an all knowing teenager thought he was completly full of crap cause I had no idea how the sound traveled in the room and out to the audience. I had no idea how volume affected EQ and vice versa. Took me almost 10 years before I realized he in fact did know his arse from a hole in the ground and knew what he was talking about as far as sculpting sound. Very subtle subtractive EQ quickly became my friend.

 

[groooooove]

i remember getting a crybaby as a birthday present in 2001.

i had the input/output reversed and was getting no sound or a weird beep noise or whatever.

i remember thinking "you probably have to be so good at guitar to make the sound jimi hendrix makes with this.."

pretty sure my dad also went to a guitar store to ask how to turn it off.

ahh...

the good old days. there was internet, but it's essentially "pre-internet" as this info was nowhere to be found..

 

[non]

instrument cables AND speaker cables? who knew?

 

[sawzalot]

Trying to make a G&L L-2000 sound like a Rickenbacker.

 

[ac100X]

I always used instrument cables to connect my amp head to the speaker cab, I always did it in the 60's, then in the 80"s all of a sudden it became very bad and dangerous to use anything but speaker cables.

 

[pfern]

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

exactly my issue. I dropped the bass eq and raised the mids. It took forever to figure it out

 

[osv]

1. Didn’t know anything about impedance.
2. Blew up speakers.
3. The graphic eq on my first “pro rig” Peavey MegaBass was a mess. I had no idea until I brought it into a shop and the tech said that I should adjust my eq. When I said “that’s how I like it” his face was a dead giveaway that I was doing something wrong.
To tell the truth, I really was pretty clueless aside from bass set up the whole time I was active in a band.

 

[Bryan R. Tyler]

I did everything wrong. Overdriving amps (still haven’t blown a speaker somehow), adjusting my bridge and truss rod without having any idea what I’m doing, plucking way too hard. No teacher and no internet lead to some serious facepalm moments.

 

[Diminishedfilth]

I started playing bass when I was 12, with my first playable bass being a Sears Catalog Precision copy with a jazz bridge pickup. I was fascinated with slap bass, and all my slap heroes at the time seemed to be playing Jazz basses, so anytime I tried to slap, I figured I had to solo the bridge pickup, being the "jazz" pickup of course. My slap tone was basically AM Radio.

 

[Michedelic]

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.

Once played in a band where the guitarist had that exact rig, and was of course too loud, even after the occasional talking to. So the rest of us conspired to do something about it. Took the back off of the cab, rewired it so that only the top two Celestions were hooked up, adjusted the ohm setting on the amp(he, not being very technically minded, didn’t have a clue), and problem…not solved, but lessened.

 

[Snibborwocky]

I think the only "wrong" noob thing I did was when I bought my first active bass back in the early 90's. I left the cable in it all the time and a quick lesson about active electronics and a new battery quickly made me a bit smarter about active instruments from then on.

 

[Michedelic]

My situation wasn’t so much what I did wrong, but having the wrong equipment, primarily the amp…a Gibson GA-20 from the 50’s. This…

Just the amp chassis in a home-made head cab. Yeah, 20 screaming watts(but what did I know?). With tremolo and a separate mic imput. EQ? Ha! Just a single “tone” control. It was part of a bundle, with an original slab EB-0 that looked like a Les Paul Jr., and had these backwards banjo type tuners.
At the time, I was just starting out, Jack Bruce was an icon, but I didn’t know an EB-0 from an EB-3, and all the for sale ad said was “Gibson bass”. It was cheap enough, and as I didn’t think a Fender was attainable in my situation, I went for it. I also didn’t want to have to mess around with some Teisco level instrument, like what my two guitar playing buddies were suffering with. While I was disappointed that it didn’t look like Jack’s, I didn’t want to try my parent’s patience as they were bankrolling this, plus, wow I had an amp too!
My dad repurposed an old TV cabinet about the size of a Marshall 4x12, put a 15” and a 12” into it, but used pegboard on the back. The Gibby head, with the way it was positioned in its separate box, looked Marshallesque as well. But be careful what you wish for. I got to the Jack Bruce goose fart sound real quick. Of course it eventually blew up, then I got a Sunn Sorado, 60 watts, two 15’s.

 

[perfektspace6]

A less technical take...

I sold a truly amazing Pedulla Thunderbuzz 6 and used the money to buy my future wife an engagement ring. I got a great deal on the Pedulla and never should have gotten rid of that thing.

 

[sawzalot]

Oh I forgot, for quite some time I ran not one but TWO major rackmount multi effects units, both running aural exciters AND THEN running the signal through a BBE Sonic Maximizer. It wasn’t till I got a good preamp that I dumped that stuff and started just going for a good organic tone.

 

[Raman]

How were you using gear WRONG as a noob?

I used to put the dish-washing tabs in the dishwasher's liquid compartment. Apparently, you need to throw the tab directly into the machine.

Wait. Isn't this talkdishwasher.com ?

 

[evs]

I used to put the dish-washing tabs in the dishwasher's liquid compartment. Apparently, you need to throw the tab directly into the machine.

Wait. Isn't this talkdishwasher.com ?

I know this is way off topic, but I didn't know that.
I've been putting the tabs in the tray.

 

[Raman]

I know this is way off topic, but I didn't know that.
I've been putting the tabs in the tray.

Check it out. It does make a difference.

 

[Chickenwheels]

-Tube amp went up in flames. I was 13.
-Used a nail to replace a blown fuse
-made a bridge for my Hofner using angle aluminium.
-Wrapped a sliver of cardboard over earth on power plug to get rid of hum.
-kept adding random speaker cabs to amp until failure.
-Tried to sound like Mark King on church gigs.
-Failed to engage with girls who came up to me after gigs.
-Played fretless out of tune.
-Coveted all the gear in magazines, failing to realise the value and potential of the gear I already had (that is now lauded).
-Changed strings too often.
-Played too loud.
Etc.

 

[kevrex]

I started playing bass in my cousins' band without ever having touched a musical instrument before. They tuned it for me, and i read in a book about how to keep it tuned by fretting on the fifth fret and tuning to that note. I learned a few songs, and learned how to spot the root notes of guitar chords they played so I could play something similar.

One night, we all went and saw some band, and they had this bizarre thing on stage. A Conn Strobotuner. This was back in the late 70s, so it was a big box with a huge display. We were amazed -- that's how the pros did it! I hit up my mom for one, telling her how it would make us sound so much more professional. I seem to recall it was $300. Maybe it wasn't, but it was an expensive thing. And she bought it for us.

ANYHOW, my cousins and I tuned up with the Strobotuner, started playing a song ... it sucked. We were nowhere near in tune with each other. The bass was in tune with itself, the guitars were in tune, but it was like they were in different keys. I took it back to the music store, they tried it out, said it was fine, but gave us our money back, anyway.

I later found out that my cousins were not the experienced musicians I had thought they were. Their way of tuning a bass was to tune the highest string on a bass to the lowest string on a guitar, then tune the bass to itself based on that E. So my high string was an E and my low string was ... what? A D flat? So weird.

I had also been playing for maybe three or four years before I learned that instruments could be "set up."