• TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
    Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
    Join free Log in
    Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.

quiet D & G on my P

bob atherton

bob atherton

Mar 8, 2005
307
116
69
#1
Last night I played a gig with a fairly new rig. I used my well know P bass and my well known Markbass LMIII amp head with brand new cabs. These are a pair of Markbass 2x10 cabs with front port slots; can't remember what they are called.

The E & A sounds just great plenty of deep tight bass but the D & G were just getting lost in the mix, they were much quieter.

Any ideas....? Thanks, Bob
 
#4
Thanks for the quick replies guys. I guess it was my fault for not giving the new cabs a good setting up first. My old cabs were two TC Electronic RS210's. They were great but never went loud enough and didn't give me quite enough low end. I guess the problem must be the voicing of the new cabs. I will give the 200-300 Hz a boost and see what that does.
 
#7
I did notice on the old cabs that the D & G were a bit on the quiet side but the new cabs have made this much more obvious. The pickup on the D/G side is higher that the E/A one. If the pickup gets too close to the strings will the volume start to fall away? Is it possible that the pickup, on the D/G side could be faulty?
 
#8
On my P I had the D&G pickup quite close to the strings and it didn't suffer from any magnetic string choking (aka Strat-itis). Try it closer and see what happens, you can always put it back where it was.

I don't think it is faulty, it it were there would be a dramatic difference, almost no signal and what was there would be all top with zero bottom.
 
#10
I just sort of went thru the same thing.
I was using a SWR BBii, and on my new G&L LB-100 the G string was quite low even after bringing up the pu and lowering the E and A strings .
So just for an experiment, I unplugged the cable to the speakers from the SWR amp portion and used my AguilarTH-500 as the amp, and then the G string was noticeably louder (same volume, of course, different wattage though)

So, now I will go back to the amp section of the SWR and see if I can improve the preamp to get more volume out of the G string, now that I know it could be the preamp, and see what happens.
 
#12
If the volume difference is very significant you may want to check the output of the D & G side pickup. I had the D & G side of a P bass pickup fail on me during a gig. There was still some output, but at a much lower volume than the E &A side pickup. Try plugging your bass into an amp you can trust, or a device with a VU or volume meter to isolate whether its the bass or the amp.
 
#15
bob atherton said:
Last night I played a gig with a fairly new rig. I used my well know P bass and my well known Markbass LMIII amp head with brand new cabs. These are a pair of Markbass 2x10 cabs with front port slots; can't remember what they are called.

The E & A sounds just great plenty of deep tight bass but the D & G were just getting lost in the mix, they were much quieter.

Any ideas....? Thanks, Bob
Click to expand...

This is a basic flaw in the p-bass design ... the p-pickup is backwards.

How to fix it?

1 - use ighter strings 95 to 40
2 - add a neck pickup
3 - add a preamp
4 - lower the pickup under the E A strings and raise the pickup under the D G strings

#1 and # 4 are the easy ones to try.
 
#18
Thank you brothers of the low end.

I have seriously adjusted the heights of my pickups and heavily tweaked the EQ on the Markbass amp.

This now sounds a lot better but the proof of the pudding will be when I get together with band again. I will keep you posted.
 
  • Like
Reactions: delta7fred

Latest posts

Top Bottom
Back