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King's X bass tone

S

singtall

Sep 30, 2013
6
0
#1
now that i'm using the tonematch feature of the axe-fx II, i'm REALLY liking what i'm able to do with it. i just did a tonematch for the bass guitar tone of doug Pinnick (king's x) and though i had to set up a complex rig with compressor split into tube screamer/filter/guitar amp, and also straight into an ampeg svt bass rig. so the bass sound travels through two paths; one straight bass rig, one guitar rig with highs/lows rolled off. after all of that, i go into a tonematch block which adds the missing link.....the final eq. works really well.

here is the soundclip:

https://soundcloud.com/singtall/doug-pinnick-tm-singtall-axe
 
#3
Nice tone, but it doesn't sound very King's X-esque to me. Then again, the sound I usually associate with dUg is the one you hear on Dogman and Tapehead.
 
#8
I don't think he really ever was a believer in sticking with a "magic pedal" or anything. Just in the last couple of years he has used the AmpTweaker Bass TightDrive and Pigtronix Disnortion. Thought I saw a cheap Ibanez drive pedal in his rig on the XV tour... Personally I've found the Darkglass B7K can come pretty darn close to copping his tone.
 
#9
I was doing a lot of futzing and tweaking trying to cop his sound...it turns out that an aforementioned cheap Ibanez distortion pedal did the trick. There's a weird EQ magic in that "attack" switch....
 
#10
i started out with much more low end, but the axe-fx tonematch feature basically re-eq'd it to the sound you hear. according to tonematch, that's his exact eq curve. when i play along with a guitar track, all i can hear is low end. so i think that the tone is in the ballpark. i will try to record it in a mix and see how the low end sounds.
 
#11
You know what? I think my ear buds suck. I thought they had pretty decent low end, but they obviously don't because it sounded a lot fuller through the good headphones, I went and dug out my good headphones from the other room. That actually does sound similar to what dUg does. Sorry bout that.

What kind of guitar amp did you use? And can you cop that sound using just the Axe-FX direct? How does that Tonematch work anyway? Do you run a clip of him playing through it?
 
#12
i used an Ibanez BTB 4 string bass with tone controls all neutral for the clip.

the clip IS the axe-fx direct to computer using it's USB output.

the tonematch works by playing back a few seconds of the actual tone you want (in this case it was the intro to "Moanjam"), then you play the same thing, and then hit "enter". the axe-fx "samples" the eq from the target tone and applies it to your preset, which gets you real close to the tone in question.

the hardest part was not the tonematch, it was trying to setup all of the components of Doug's rig and get the distortion only on certain frequencies.
 
#16
tone is nice, record is nice; radial has a 500 mod that cuts input into seperately filtered channels, it's expenisve though that would probably give you interesting eq'ing options to explore this concept further; especially in a send/return loop; which i am dying to try one of these days, especially for guitar
 

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