Jaco Fender Fretless tone

put an Epoxy-coating on the fretboard

 

1. epoxy the board ( I use the Bondo resin in thin coats and sand a bunch until its smooth)

2: roundwounds

3. immense amounts of talent and practice

 

+1 to the roundwounds, also lots and lots of mids and hi mids.

 

Turn up the bridge pickup and slightly turn down the neck pickup.

 

I get the Jaco tone best with soloed bridge pup, cranked tone, lots of mids, played right in front of the bridge, and on fretted basses

NO mwah, but for overall sound thats as close as I can get. Probably because I suck

 

Jaco played fretted basses too, so that makes sense.

 

true, but its not his "signature" sound for the most part.

 

All of the above, PLUS:

Get any piece of EQ gear that allows you to boost 800 to 1000 Hz. This is where "mwah" lives. Best if you can adjust the frequency. The usual selling name for such devices is "sweepable midrange" or "semi-parametric midrange" or something like that.

 

The tone on Jaco’s first solo album is full and warm. You can hear it clearly on the first track. The neck pickup must be in there too, even if the bridge pickup is favoured. Didn’t Jaco add lots of bass on his Acoustic amp too ?

 

Try to get the action on your bass REALLY LOW. (sorry for shouting) and use roundwounds

 

Incidentally, you may need to cut the treble at the amp -- they mwah is bright, but there's no clacky hi-fi tic-tac in Jaco's tone, and that GK is built to be quite hi-fi.

I've always found that there is a tradeoff between sub lows and 900 Hz mwah -- I can't really get both. The presence of either pretty much demands much less of the other, and the lows seem to be the dominant -- if you turn up the lows, you bury the mwah, but once the lows are there, you can't add enough mids to overcome it.

Given that, I believe that the way the bottom end sounded full on Jaco recordings was that his whole sound was way forward in the mix, so that his low end balanced out the other instruments while his midrange mwah was way out front. I keep trying to convince my bandmates to let me mix like that, but they say they'll do it when I'm as good as Jaco. Rats...

 

+1

 

Buy a used Squire Vintage Modified fretless bass. I can get his "tone" by soloing the bridge pickup on mine.