Double Bass Too much low end from slap element

[Dude Oss]

Hello fellow bass players,

I play the upright bass rockabilly style for 1,5 years now. Awesome instrument to play, but I have an issue I havent been able to solve yet.

I use a separate slap element which is mixed with the regular element and then goes into a Fishman pre amp with EQ. The problem is that I only want to hear the very clean clicking sound but it is too bassy now and messes up the bass line. If I turn up treble the whole bass sounds crap.

I don't like to run slap directly into the PA system because I want to mix the amount of slap depending on the song and I want to hear it from my bass amp because I don't use another monitor.

Is it normal that EQ'in the slap element is necessary? I use a very cheap eBay element. I already used different positions. Am I doing something wrong?

 

[Fredrik E. Nilsen]

You run both pickups into a single EQ? Yes, it's normal to EQ the slap pickup.

 

[Dude Oss]

You run both pickups into a single EQ? Yes, it's normal to EQ the slap pickup.

Both in single EQ yes...

 

[Fredrik E. Nilsen]

You should really try a pre-amp with two channels and separate EQ for each channel (or at least bypass of the EQ for one of the channels).

 

[jefkritz]

You should really try a pre-amp with two channels and separate EQ for each channel (or at least bypass of the EQ for one of the channels).

This

 

[Don Hergert]

I'm pretty much an amp/DI newbie since I mostly play acoustically for bluegrass/old-jazz/roots music, but my bass came to me about 6 months ago with a dual (bridge wing / under-fingerboard) pickup installed (Vic's Pickups Model C). There's a single stereo out that is designed to go into a two channel pre-amp for EQ that then would go out to the amp or DI.

While I do slap casually for the genre that I play, I actually still prefer to go acoustically when I can. However over the last 6 months I've DI'd into a PA quite a few times for performances as well as into a studio recording system, and lately I also have been playing around with an amp. But I don't have a stereo pre-amp for this bass yet and I'm sort of avoiding that level of complexity... Happily for me the stereo out that came with my pickups defaults to the bridge wing pickup when a standard mono cable is plugged into it.

On my bass when going through an amp or DI, that single bridge wing pickup also picks up slap very well, in fact too well for my tastes, so I recently experimented by moving the bridge pickup from the bass-side bridge wing to the treble-side bridge wing, and that really helped lower the volume of the slap. It also greatly improved the balance of the pickup output's volume and tone for the strings I'm using (Innovation SilverSlaps E and A with SBW Deluxe D and G, which are actually very nicely balanced acoustically). So for my amp and DI purposes this was a big success.

Having gone through this experience, it strikes me that the OP may also be having trouble with the bridge wing pickup bleeding a lot of the sound of the slap into the bridge channel. If that is the case, switching the bridge wing pickup to the treble side might also help.

Good luck, YMMV...

 

[Dude Oss]

Thanks for your tips. Have to EQ them

 

[DonaldFraser]

Hello fellow bass players,

I play the upright bass rockabilly style for 1,5 years now. Awesome instrument to play, but I have an issue I havent been able to solve yet.

I use a separate slap element which is mixed with the regular element and then goes into a Fishman pre amp with EQ. The problem is that I only want to hear the very clean clicking sound but it is too bassy now and messes up the bass line. If I turn up treble the whole bass sounds crap.

I don't like to run slap directly into the PA system because I want to mix the amount of slap depending on the song and I want to hear it from my bass amp because I don't use another monitor.

Is it normal that EQ'in the slap element is necessary? I use a very cheap eBay element. I already used different positions. Am I doing something wrong?

If you’re getting too much bass in your click you may be getting resonance from the upper bout. Try taping some foam or cotton balls over the the click to insulate it from the body vibration. It could also be a bit loose. I ended up super gluing my clicks in place once I found the sweet spot on the FB.