I’m curious to know what others are doing with their amp settings. My rig: Upright bass with Full Circle pickup into a Red Eye preamp into a Traynor amp.
I often get boominess (a word?).
It seems like I need to keep the bass eq way down to avoid it, but then the overall sound isn’t right. Mids? Treble way down.
I’d like to see what others are doing to EQ their upright sound?
I know it also relates to the room but maybe there’s a common setting?
Thanks
IMHO, the answer will only be relevant if your question is stated like this. What setting do you use with my bass, pickup, and rig? In other words someone would need to actually fiddle around with your gear.
There will also be variation depending on acoustics and the spatial relationship between th speaker and bass.
Beyond that, I have actually had players use my gear...and they adjusted it totally different than I do...and they sounded great.
Of course, none of this is helpful, so I should add:
I usually elevate my speaker and tilt it back to aim at my head. There are two ideas behind this. 1. I believe this puts less energy into the basses body, which means the feedback loop that passes between the bass, pickup, amp, and speaker is a bit weaker. Weakening the feedback loop allows you to turn up a bit more before the sound becomes totally unusable. 2. Elevating and tilting the cab also shorten the path the sound travels from the speaker to my ears, and ensures my ears are in the dispersion pattern for the entire frequency range. This allows me to hear better at a lower volume, which is useful for me because I almost always rely on the PA to deliver my sound to the audience.
The downside is some players prefer a deep thumpy sound and don't won't to hear the higher frequencies. If this is you, you probably wont' like elevating the cab and aiming it at your head.
Something else I do is use corrective EQ. A simple Bass, Mid, Treble control is generally used to bet a sound. It's not flexible enough to compensate for acoustic problems or the non-linearities that occur in your signal path.
Probably the best utilality EQ I have used was a 31-band graphic. With 31 sliders, the bandwidth is narrow enough that you can cut without gutting your sound. Since the sliders are spaced at 1/3 octave, you want be able to cut precisely where the problem frequency is but, in my experience it's close enough. Unfortunately, I don't believe anyone makes a 31-band pedal.
A fully parametric EQ can be even more precise. Fully parametric allows you to adjust frequency center, bandwidth, and the degree of cut or boost. Parametric EQ pedals also tend to be somewhat limited. Most are not fully parametric.
The Parametric I would suggest trying it the Empress MkII ParaEQ Deluxe.
This unit has three bands of parametric EQ. You can adjust frequency center, bandwidth, and the amount of cut and boost. The limiting factor is the frequency bands have limited range. Adjacent bands overlap, but the don't cover the full audio spectrum. See the pedal controls above. I think the two lower bands would be useful for notching out feed back. The high band would probably be most useful configure as a wide band with a gentle cut use to mellow out the high-mids a bit.
The Deluxe also has Bass and Treble shelving controls, variable HPF and LPF, and a selectable Boost feature.
If you are interested:
ParaEq MKII – Empress Effects Inc.
The Source Audio EQ2, may be a better solution, but I think most players will find it overly confusing and fiddly.
EQ2 Programmable Equalizer - Source Audio Website
This is a 10-band EQ and it says you can adjust frequency center and Q for each band. The adjustment range is 20-20kHz.
but had to learn from a great bass player that turned his bass and low mid down to 9 oclock or maybe less on the Markbass, and made it sound great, and not as muddy.
