Muddy sound

[rtslinger]

I have two Peavey combo amps 12" and 15" never told they were muddy?
Sounds like someone is in your sonic space. If they aren't willing to move, then you are going to have to move to another sonic space to eliminated the clash. Sometimes an easy fix is, if the guitarist is playing low on the neck you move up to grab your notes and when he goes high you drop in down to the 1st 5 frets.

 

[Egg250]

It is mainly in the speaker and eq. Lo-mids are where the mud can be. Boomy sound is in the lows. Hi-mids and up are where you can really cut through and have some crisp presence in your sound. My interpretation is he wants you to sound a particular way or simply has a bias against Peavey.

Double+ on those comments about him staying out your space. More importantly, if the guitars are playing low, maybe you play high. When the guitars are playing high you stay low. If they are in the middle, you can go low or high, or start low and finish high. Just because the guitars are playing an A chord doesn't mean you have to stick with an A root. Find some harmony in the bass line. That will help you stand out in the mix. Not all the time, but every so often remind everyone the bassist has chops too.

 

[Evan38109]

When I'm in this position, I like to look at the arrangement first.

Since you mentioned having that midrange-y Adam Clayton amp, take a listen to U2's New Year's Day or similar. There's a big, midrange-heavy bass riff dominating the middle of the song. Edge's guitar is higher in the frequency spectrum so it sits up top and off to the sides, kinda pushed backwards. Oh, and a single note at a time on the keyboard. Everything is moved out of the way so the bass can have that big piece of midrange real estate. It's helps that it's a pretty sparse arrangement compared to a lot of today's music, too.

Then listen to a some guitar rock. Nirvana, Foo Fighters, whatever. Where the guitars are the driving element, the bass is the one that needs to move out of the way. Usually that means scooping out the midrange, sometimes with a little grit, paired with complementary cuts in the guitars so they don't fight too much. Regardless, the bass lines tend to be pretty low and fairly simple. It's not just frequency space, it's musical space.

Either way, each instrument needs its own space. When I feel like a song is muddy, I usually step back and realize that I've plopped two instruments into the same musical space. EQ and levels are part of the picture, but honestly, my favorite approach these days is some rearrangement. Rewriting a few parts can make some natural space for each instrument, and really help convey the most important part of the song.

 

[Lava]

Do you have keyboards in the band?

 

[XLunacy]

2) Overdriving a speaker. Speakers distort when pushed hard. Bass guitar cabinets (because we have a crazy idea that we want to be able to transport them in cars) are made to be small and loud. The Physics doesn't allow this to go without punishment - what suffers is that bass guitar cabinets can't handle high power low frequency signals without creating harmonics. The lower harmonics (at 2 and 3 times the input signal) generally sound "musical". The 6th sounds OK, too. But the 5th, and especially the 7th can get ugly. 7 times 41 Hz (your low E) is 280 Hz (7 times an "F"'s fundamental is 300 Hz) - the lowest fundamentals on your bass (which sound glorious if well reproduced) won't go through a typical bass rig at high power without creating harmonics that are in the mud region.

Couldn't the same be said in general about any step in the signal chain that adds some (desired or not) overdrive, not just speaker distortion ?

 

[-Asdfgh-]

My guitarist and I got into a discussion the other day about muddy sounds. He claims peavey was notorious for causing a muddy sound. I used to play out of a peavey 115 combo and he said that nothing I did could dial the mud out. 20 years later I got a fender rumble 800 stage and he loved the tone out of that amp. I also have an ampeg SVT vr with the 410 HLF heritage cabinet he likes and a fender bassman 800 he likes. He says that mids on a bass amp turned up cause the sound to be muddier and I always thought mids helped you cut through. It's weird. He always told me to turn down with the peavey when I could barely hear myself. With the ampeg I think I'm way too loud and he tells me to turn up. What are your thoughts on this? Is his argument valid? I had used 4 and 5 strings with the peavey.

I never though Peavey (old Peavey) was muddy, just a bit blah and lifeless.

 

[micguy]

Couldn't the same be said in general about any step in the signal chain that adds some (desired or not) overdrive, not just speaker distortion ?

Speakers don't radiate the fundamental well, so the upper harmonics are more prominent when a speaker is overdriven than with most mechanisms. In addition, a woofer overdrives much easier at low frequencies than it does at higher frequencies - it's not at all like amplifier clipping, where every frequency has the same limit.

 

[ricardol]

20 years later I got a fender rumble 800 stage and he loved the tone out of that amp. I also have an ampeg SVT vr with the 410 HLF heritage cabinet he likes and a fender bassman 800 he likes.

This might be a little off topic but how good is the Rumble Stage 800 on emulating your SVT and Bassman amps?

 

[misterCRUSH]

I play an Ampeg PF 500. I boost the mids as I play fretless. I was playing through an Ampeg 115 and it was really muddy. I switched the cab to a Phil Jones Bass 67 (6 7 inch speakers and a 3 inch horn). There is a remarkable difference. Night and day.

 

[Guitalia]

Maybe ask a sound engineer that you and the guitarist both trust for advice on how you should each EQ your amps.

Wish I'd thought of doing that with my last band. The guitarist played through a Fender Bassman, and his low E and A strings was as loud as or louder than my equivalent notes. And the keys player loved to do full left-hand chords on his 88-key Roland. We often worked with a sound guy who would have been happy to help, especially because he was didn't like the guitarist, having to ask him over and over to turn down so the sound guy could get the mix right.

Also, you probably should consider buying one of the high-pass filters that were mentioned a couple of times in this thread. That alone might make the problem go away/the guitarist shut up.

Final thoughts: if you guys play covers, you and the guitarist ought to listen to some of the many isolated tracks videos on YouTube. Led Zeppelin songs, for instance. The bass is all mids, with no ultra-low getting in the way of the bass drum, while the guitar has very little going on in the mids.

And if you play Stones covers, you could point out---diplomatically---that Keith Richards figured this out decades ago, when he stopped using a low E string on his guitars.

Also, you could mention that many guitarists---the late Johnny Winter comes to mind---have kept the bass knob on their amps turned all the way down.

 

[Cory rich40]

This might be a little off topic but how good is the Rumble Stage 800 on emulating your SVT and Bassman amps?

When the stage 800 was in its normal mode the guitarist asked me if it was a tube amp. I could tell the difference though. It's still a great amp to own I think