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P bass sounds terrible
- Thread starter alex1fly
- Start date
D
Just to make sure we're not missing something here:
When you say "Fender Original 60s Pickup" do you mean the Fender "Original" pickup or the pickup in the Fender "Original 60s" basses?
The Fender "Original" pickup has more upper mid presence and bite than most P-bass pickups. Definitely not bloated lows. What you are describing is not caused by this pickup unless it's WAY out of spec or you've set the pickup height completely wrong. Some people actually find the "Original" a bit harsh in the upper mids. Personally I love it. On the right bass and with the right strings it's actually one of my favourite P-bass pickups. The extra upper mid presence is great for flats or mellow pure nickel rounds. Plus it's a reasonably cheap pickup. If you're getting bloated lows with this pickup you must either have adjusted your pickup height wrong or you've got an out-of-spec pickup. When this pickup is adjusted correctly the bass should sit nicely in the mix without much eq adjustments. I'm assuming you're not boosting the lows anywhere along your signal chain (which would be a silly thing to do if you're complaining about bloated lows).
However...
If you're talking about the pickup in the "Original 60s" P-basses... that's the Pure Vintage 63 pickup which sounds more or less exactly like your description: Bloated lows, muddy with flats. It's an overwound P-bass pickup with a tone that's nowhere near any vintage 60s P-bass pickups I've heard. I guess Fender just like to stick a "60s something"-label on everything to make it sell better. With the PV63 they went WAY too far towards "mellow&warm" and ended up with a parody of a 60s P-bass tone. No vintage 60s P-bass pickups I've tried have sounded even remotely like the PV63. It doesn't exactly help that they paired it with a .100 tone cap in the Original 60s-basses. These basses can sound nice with brighter rounds but are total mud machines with old school flats like LaBellas.
So basically:
If you've got an "Original" pickup, check your pickup height. If that doesn't work... I dunno... You've already tried the TI Jazz Flats and they're as far from a muddy tone and bloated lows as you're ever gonna get. A P-bass with these pickups should sit very nicely in the mix and have a strong presence in the upper mids. Maybe you should consider ditching the P and get a bass with a bridge pickup? A bridge pickup should get rid of any bloated lows in an instant (but it might not be the tone you're looking for?).
If you've got an "Original 60s" bass the solution is far easier: Replace the Pure Vintage 63 pickup with something else. Practically ANY other P-bass pickup will give you less mud and less bloated lows. Change the tone cap to .047. Done.
When you say "Fender Original 60s Pickup" do you mean the Fender "Original" pickup or the pickup in the Fender "Original 60s" basses?
The Fender "Original" pickup has more upper mid presence and bite than most P-bass pickups. Definitely not bloated lows. What you are describing is not caused by this pickup unless it's WAY out of spec or you've set the pickup height completely wrong. Some people actually find the "Original" a bit harsh in the upper mids. Personally I love it. On the right bass and with the right strings it's actually one of my favourite P-bass pickups. The extra upper mid presence is great for flats or mellow pure nickel rounds. Plus it's a reasonably cheap pickup. If you're getting bloated lows with this pickup you must either have adjusted your pickup height wrong or you've got an out-of-spec pickup. When this pickup is adjusted correctly the bass should sit nicely in the mix without much eq adjustments. I'm assuming you're not boosting the lows anywhere along your signal chain (which would be a silly thing to do if you're complaining about bloated lows).
However...
If you're talking about the pickup in the "Original 60s" P-basses... that's the Pure Vintage 63 pickup which sounds more or less exactly like your description: Bloated lows, muddy with flats. It's an overwound P-bass pickup with a tone that's nowhere near any vintage 60s P-bass pickups I've heard. I guess Fender just like to stick a "60s something"-label on everything to make it sell better. With the PV63 they went WAY too far towards "mellow&warm" and ended up with a parody of a 60s P-bass tone. No vintage 60s P-bass pickups I've tried have sounded even remotely like the PV63. It doesn't exactly help that they paired it with a .100 tone cap in the Original 60s-basses. These basses can sound nice with brighter rounds but are total mud machines with old school flats like LaBellas.
So basically:
If you've got an "Original" pickup, check your pickup height. If that doesn't work... I dunno... You've already tried the TI Jazz Flats and they're as far from a muddy tone and bloated lows as you're ever gonna get. A P-bass with these pickups should sit very nicely in the mix and have a strong presence in the upper mids. Maybe you should consider ditching the P and get a bass with a bridge pickup? A bridge pickup should get rid of any bloated lows in an instant (but it might not be the tone you're looking for?).
If you've got an "Original 60s" bass the solution is far easier: Replace the Pure Vintage 63 pickup with something else. Practically ANY other P-bass pickup will give you less mud and less bloated lows. Change the tone cap to .047. Done.
Open that tone knob up and use the head and tour sansamp to shape the sound. I LOVE my jazz basses and I routinely pass over it to record (and play live lately) my p bass. I let the p bass sit wide open on the controls and use a bass VT and a tone hammer to shape it.
With the information you provided the only thing I can think of is that this bass is from an overseas vendor so the electrics and other hardware is less than optimal... I'm making assumptions, so here goes.
This is my method... and I've done this to every one my used working stock, I haven't bought a brand new stringed instrument since the early 70s. I usually buy used fixers and have never been disappointed.
Firstly... check ALL cables in the chain. I have a cable checker, a meter works too.
Where was the offending Fender bass manufactured?
Start with a set up that is factory spec. Make sure the pick up is at spec height.
If it still sounds bad with the spec setup on the bass I would go to pick up and potentiometers and caps and jack. If it's an overseas Fender gut it and put in some quality pickups, quality potentiometers, quality capacitors and a quality Jack.
Or a passive emg solderless kit, just because it's soooo easy.
This is my method... and I've done this to every one my used working stock, I haven't bought a brand new stringed instrument since the early 70s. I usually buy used fixers and have never been disappointed.
Firstly... check ALL cables in the chain. I have a cable checker, a meter works too.
Where was the offending Fender bass manufactured?
Start with a set up that is factory spec. Make sure the pick up is at spec height.
If it still sounds bad with the spec setup on the bass I would go to pick up and potentiometers and caps and jack. If it's an overseas Fender gut it and put in some quality pickups, quality potentiometers, quality capacitors and a quality Jack.
Or a passive emg solderless kit, just because it's soooo easy.
It really sounds like your pickup is too high. Recording will exacerbate any sound issues your bass has that may not be noticeable live through an amp. And if your bass can never have the volume up all the way live, I’m thinking there’s an issue with the bass that has become more noticeable/detrimental in a DAW.
Since your j bass sounds fine in the studio, I’m really thinking the p bass pickup height should be looked at more seriously. I’ve found that my p’s sound best with the pickups set a bit lower than factory spec. But that’s my personal preference. You might need to add more gain after doing this, but I’d rather boost a clean signal rather than cut a dirty signal.
Secondly, whatever setting on your sansamp/fractal/amp head you use live will need to be reset from scratch in a recording setting. Your bass amp reproduces sound frequencies way differently than studio monitors and home or car speakers.
Also, where’s your HPF/low frequency roll off set in the DAW?
Since your j bass sounds fine in the studio, I’m really thinking the p bass pickup height should be looked at more seriously. I’ve found that my p’s sound best with the pickups set a bit lower than factory spec. But that’s my personal preference. You might need to add more gain after doing this, but I’d rather boost a clean signal rather than cut a dirty signal.
Secondly, whatever setting on your sansamp/fractal/amp head you use live will need to be reset from scratch in a recording setting. Your bass amp reproduces sound frequencies way differently than studio monitors and home or car speakers.
Also, where’s your HPF/low frequency roll off set in the DAW?
I'm not a producer or engineer, but many times (especially with rock-type of music), the isolated bass track tone (purposefully) sounds pretty different from that same tone once it is mixed and mastered. What genre of music are you recording?
JeezyMcNuggles
Inactive
- Feb 23, 2018
- 14,723
- 20,970
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- I suck, but nobody really notices
JeezyMcNuggles
Inactive
- Feb 23, 2018
- 14,723
- 20,970
- Disclosures
- I suck, but nobody really notices
For me, it's the opposite though. I love my J types more live, and my P on recordings.
Mids are your friend in a recording setting as is ditching the amp and running a DI box directly into the board. Try the Sansamp.
That's so true. Listen to some isolated Geddy tracks and they sound a bit more tame but perfect in the final mix.
If you like your tone, and you want your tone to be accurately reflected in the recording, I wouldn't suggest making dramatic changes to your strings, pickup, playing style, etc. You want to make your tone work, you want to sound like you. One thing that's getting missed in many of the replies here is that in a recording, the EQ response of every instrument affects the listener's perception of every other instrument. So, for example, if you have a keys player hanging out on the left side of their board in the same general EQ region as your P, those two instruments are going to fight each other for dominance, with the result being that one or both instruments sound muddy. The best fix in that case is in the arrangement, not necessarily the signal processing. Ask your keyboard player to play an octave higher and that might fix the problem there.
The next fix is high passing any instruments that are pushing up against your bass tone. Your fundamental frequency is somewhere in the 60-200hz range, but that fundamental is more felt than heard - the "tone" that you love about your bass really comes from harmonic information in the lower to middle midrange. So you should look there for conflicts as well. Again that can be fixed in the arrangement, but if that's untenable, you can use subtractive EQing and LPF/HPFs to shape your other instruments.
You can also use compression to bring out your transient and light saturation to sweeten the sustain of your bass. Really subtle settings here will make dramatic differences in your overall mix. When mixing bass I prefer parallel saturation and compression in most cases, so that their respective effects are not too obvious, but use your ears to determine what works best for you.
One final note - as an amateur who spends wayyyy too much of his free time reading, thinking, and practicing these things, I find that bass is the most difficult instrument to mix. It has an absurdly wide EQ range - open up a spectrogram and see how it's spread from like 20hz to like 3khz. It's going to conflict with everything. This means you should be as conscious of the space in your recording created by the arrangement as you are about the relative loudness of different instruments playing simultaneously.
The next fix is high passing any instruments that are pushing up against your bass tone. Your fundamental frequency is somewhere in the 60-200hz range, but that fundamental is more felt than heard - the "tone" that you love about your bass really comes from harmonic information in the lower to middle midrange. So you should look there for conflicts as well. Again that can be fixed in the arrangement, but if that's untenable, you can use subtractive EQing and LPF/HPFs to shape your other instruments.
You can also use compression to bring out your transient and light saturation to sweeten the sustain of your bass. Really subtle settings here will make dramatic differences in your overall mix. When mixing bass I prefer parallel saturation and compression in most cases, so that their respective effects are not too obvious, but use your ears to determine what works best for you.
One final note - as an amateur who spends wayyyy too much of his free time reading, thinking, and practicing these things, I find that bass is the most difficult instrument to mix. It has an absurdly wide EQ range - open up a spectrogram and see how it's spread from like 20hz to like 3khz. It's going to conflict with everything. This means you should be as conscious of the space in your recording created by the arrangement as you are about the relative loudness of different instruments playing simultaneously.
TI flats sound huge when played softly on the P Bass. Maybe it is their low tension. I don’t think I have ever had much luck with anything more aggressive than a light touch with them.
If your live tone is great try mic-ing your rig. Something in proicessing your direct-to-board sound compromises it.
I sit the bass, snare and kick in the middle of the mix and pan everything else left and right. I high pass the my p bass between 45/80hz. And maybe add a boost on the bass between 65/100hz. Also low pass at 3.15khz. High passing the low frequencies the guitars don’t need could be a good idea too.
Bass EQ can look something like this.
Bass EQ can look something like this.
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The low pass on the ultra-lows and the mid bump are two of the key things of mixed bass IMHO.
I'm here looking for the "this is how I fixed it" post. @alex1fly can you drop a "this is what was wrong and how I fixed it" post when you do fix it?
It sounds like an EQ thing, not a player/string, etc. thing. That's your sound, keep it. Telling you to use my preferences would be silly. Just figure out the EQ. Could possibly be sound processing in the pedals. I've clipped my pedals before from too much input.
I'm not the most learned on this.... so I'll use it as an excuse to repost this lovely video. To help with mud.
Edit: try sticking your bass directly into a headphone amp, or similar. Nothing else, minimal between bass and ears. If it sounds good there, then it's the rest of the signal chain. My sixth grade teacher would be proud I remember the process of elimination.
It sounds like an EQ thing, not a player/string, etc. thing. That's your sound, keep it. Telling you to use my preferences would be silly. Just figure out the EQ. Could possibly be sound processing in the pedals. I've clipped my pedals before from too much input.
I'm not the most learned on this.... so I'll use it as an excuse to repost this lovely video. To help with mud.
Edit: try sticking your bass directly into a headphone amp, or similar. Nothing else, minimal between bass and ears. If it sounds good there, then it's the rest of the signal chain. My sixth grade teacher would be proud I remember the process of elimination.
