Muddy Amp, or Muddy Room? Back to Tubes?

HPF for the win!
Fishhheadjoe

 

Sweet bass and nice rig.

I have an old Peavey tube amp that I always bypass the pre. You could always just add an additional preampish pedal for your clean tones. I frequently use a Damnation Audio MBD with the gain low.

 

If the guitarists are flooding the bass frequencies there's not a lot you can do on your own whatever amp you have other than ask them to turn their bass controls back a bit.

 

“other than ask them to turn their bass controls back a bit.”

yeah, right. That’ll work!! This guy has a big problem!

 

Agreed. Strange that going straight into the effects return sorted the problem though. Maybe the Terrorbass pre is muddy?

 

Will you soon be playing other places with this band ? I would hesitate to spend much right away. Some rooms just sound horrible. It would be unfortunate to spend a bunch of money and find out that it’s just truly a horrible sounding room.

 

I’m not big on the darkglass pedals in general, but if I recall correctly they have a bit of a sculpted low mid with a big notch in the 300hz area. Add that to the Orange terror preamp which is also inherently a bit mid scooped and I think you just have too much mid loss going on relative to the highs and lows. Might explain why it sounded better running in to the effects return. As I said, I don’t care much for the DG sound, but I liked it even less running in to my hiwatt and fender preamp style amps.

 

The great conundrum of playing electric bass through amps.

Sounded great at home.

Sounded like hell when I brought it in here on Tuesday.

Got it straightened out in the same room Wednesday, didn't touch a thing once it got there. Great !

Walked in today, amp settings 'frozen' from yesterday: Sounds like hell again, just like Tuesday, but worse.

Ehhh . . . . . . . . .

I must be tougher than I thought that it never drove me to drink, but man did I show my ass a time or two over it.

 

This is my guess as well.

The amp has a "Fender" tone stack and definitely falls in the Fender tone universe IMHO. You must run the Mids relatively high and the Bass and Treble relatively low, to avoid too much mid scoop. Try Bass, Mids, and Treble around about 10:00, 3:00 and 9:00 o'clock.


In contrast, the natural voice of an SVT is pretty much flat, with a very gentle broadband boost in the low mids centered around 400hz. You can't dial in an SVT to sound like the Orange, and you can't dial in the Orange to sound like an SVT.

If you have an EQ pedal, try using it to boost the mids.

 

Where are you standing in relation to the cabs?

Stand about ten feet away if possible and then see what it sounds like. If you’ve tried that Nevermind.

 

Crank the mods, cut the lows and consider an HPF to cut the noisy low mush.

 

Try this for finding the sweet spot

 

I'd just get a new amp.leave everything else alone. I couldn't get a tone I liked outta those oranges. The pre amps are just set up strange.

Keep your cab. Get a 7pro, or subway if you got the cash.

 

Some rooms, I stood everywhere except on top of my car out in the parking lot. Standing waves and nulls were invented by The Devil to drive me nuts.

 

SVT-7's are great amps!! Many Ampeg cabinets (other than the 410 HLF) will have tighter low end, too.

IIRC the Orange amps started out with Baxandall tone stacks (like Ampegs), which don't scoop the mids inherently. However, they evolved to the point of having a Fender-style tone stack with an inherent mid scoop. On a well-engineered bass amp (the venerable Acoustic 360 for example), this scoop is centred at the low-mid 'mush' frequencies, and could remove just the right amount of that. However, if a designer directly puts a guitar-voiced Fender tone stack onto a bass head (e.g. Fender and Marshall, maybe also Orange?), it might cut too much into the higher mids, resulting in a muddy sound that doesn't cut through the mix.

 

+1 on the HPF

 

I'm not seeing how a tube amp would solve the issues the OP is bedeviled with.

Lots of issues to unpack which have been unpacked in this thread but a full on tube amp is not going to solve them.

Analogeezer