My amp (Ampeg SVT7 pro) has a midscoop button that works well. We play a crazy variety of music. I keep my mids up at neutral, but if we play a song that needs slapping, I turn around and push in the scoop button. On occasion, I remember to un push that button.
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What's Wrong with Scooping the Mids?
- Thread starter JazzyJacuzzi
- Start date
Actually a pretty easy answer for that. When you scoop the mids out of your bass, you fade into the indiscernible background when playing in a group. The low mids from ~250Hz to 500Hz is what gives your bass presence and definition. Scoop that out and you lose the articulation to your bass lines that you "think" you're playing. You'll hear a difference when you stop playing but there's just no definition to your bass lines and no one can tell what you're playing.
That's because you are competing with the other instruments in your group for the sonic space. The Bass drum owns the lows and when you fight that, you lose. The guitars and keys will eat up the high-mids and highs and the only place you can really call your own is the low-mids. If you ever go into a recording studio, you'll often see this big, multi-colored, organizational chart on the wall showing all the various instruments and their prime frequency ranges for recording. The bass owns the low-mids in those charts. Just a little boost there will give you a nice presence and definition in the mix without the need to overpower everybody else - makes a nice mix of sound.
It doesn't take a lot of boost to be heard with the low mids but it really clears things up with a little boost there. If you are adjusting your low mids and you hear your sound honk at you, you've boosted it too much. So drop it back down slowly until that honking sound disappears. On my amps, I typically boost the low mids at either 250Hz or 500Hz and I'll turn the boost up to around 1:30 with my passive Jazz Bass. I like to boost the low-mids at 250Hz if I can address that frequency.
However, I have to admit that when I boosted them at 500Hz at a professional recording studio, I got the very best sound out of it in the raw recording. So much so that the owner and the engineer both came out to find out what I was using and how I had it set. I was using my WTDI (DI with built-in Eden WT preamp and compressor) into the board and ran it flat with only a little boost at 500Hz because I couldn't address 250Hz with it, and no compression. So if your amp has any low-mids control between 250Hz and 500Hz, just give it a little boost and see how it sounds. Anywhere inside that range will work.
Now when you are playing at bedroom practice levels, you don't want to do what I just said. You want to do the opposite. You want to scoop the mids and boost the bass and treble. The reason for that is that human ear doesn't hear the bass and treble very well at low levels but hears the mids just fine. So for bedroom practice, for solos where you're not competing with other instruments, or for playing with non-amped acoustic guitars, that scooped sound works fine. Just don't try that when playing with a group and expect yourself to be heard because you won't be.
Doner Designs
Steve Doner
- Jun 2, 2012
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Mids are not one frequency. I boost the high mids and cut the low mids. A three band EQ is worthless to me.
Scooping the mids can be fine. But ask yourself… "at what cost." Joking
At a point things advance to asking about low mids, high mids. Then get a datkglass multiband eq. Lows, highs… and multiple bands of mids.
we feel lows, and work with the kick in this region. most uktra lows we hear are harmonics in mid frequencies.
highs get lost in the mix when the guitarists do the "twing twang zing". Basically your string noise and that definition. Mids… low and high mids and all in between are our territory. 300k to 3k. But standard tuning guitars are into high mids… thus the talk of the importance if low mids.
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A lot of guitarists practice alone with the bass turned up and mids turned down to make up for the lack of a bass guitar. Then when they play live, they don't change the settings to leave room for the bass. It gets all muddy, especially with 7-string guitars and down-tuning. When I listen to rock bands like Black Sabbath, the Who, or Led Zeppelin, the guitars are recorded very mid-strong and bass owns the low end and sounds huge. The reason those bands left room for the bass guitar in the sonic spectrum for low mids and bass register. In the Eighties, scooping the lows on the bass was the only part of the spectrum left over. It loses the sweetness of the bass' mid-register.
The real trick of it all is that you do need enough mids for definition, and probably less deep end than you think. Reverse that, and it gets muddy fast. Duck Dunn once remarked that live he used ALL mids, which he hated, but it sounded perfect in the blend.
The utterly aggravating thing is the final tone that works best with the band and a given venue . . . . may be the LAST thing you want to hear. To add insult to injury, tomorrow night you may very well have to start over to get back to that.
Aside from playing in clubs, this was the '2' of the 1-2 Punch that finally killed me off for playing out. I never in 20-odd years got a handle on tone in loud, live settings, and if I had a dollar for every 'can you turn that thing down, you're killing us' when I could not hear myself moment, I'd be living in Antigua now. Skipping all that would be the ultimate advantage of IEM's, which I never got to use.
The utterly aggravating thing is the final tone that works best with the band and a given venue . . . . may be the LAST thing you want to hear. To add insult to injury, tomorrow night you may very well have to start over to get back to that.
Aside from playing in clubs, this was the '2' of the 1-2 Punch that finally killed me off for playing out. I never in 20-odd years got a handle on tone in loud, live settings, and if I had a dollar for every 'can you turn that thing down, you're killing us' when I could not hear myself moment, I'd be living in Antigua now. Skipping all that would be the ultimate advantage of IEM's, which I never got to use.
There is no end of people here who will tell you that mids are how you get heard in a mix, in order to carve out your own sonic space between the guitars and the kick drum (or some variation of that). I know I'm in a distinct minority here, but I disagree. To explain why, I have to tell a story.
About 9 years ago, there was a TalkBass get-together at a pub on the Seattle waterfront. If you've never been to a TB GTG, you owe it to yourself to go. It's basically show-&-tell for bass players. I brought my 3-pickup Warmoth Jazz bass, a small 200W amp, a Phil Jones 6x5 cab, and my guitar playing friend.
There must have been at least 40 amps there, at least 60 bass players, and over 100 basses. At any given moment, there were 3-8 bass players playing on someone's bass through someone's amp. And as my friend pointed out, they weren't just playing the bass, they were showing off their chops. It all made for a wonderful cacophony, which only paused when @Selta interrupted us to make some announcements and do a few giveaways.
Anyway, for part of the proceedings, my friend had parked himself at the far wall, and was just observing. He thought that among the sonic mud, he could hear my bass being played. He watched the fingers of whoever was playing my bass at the time, and sure enough, that's what he was hearing. My friend thought it might be the guy's technique, so when the guy moved from my bass to someone else's bass on someone else's amp, my friend was surprised when he couldn't hear what the guy was playing. Then someone else picked up my bass and started playing, and then my friend could hear that.
Now, my bass is a great bass, equipped with the best pickups Fender ever made IMO (Super 55), and it's tonally very flexible, but any individual tone is not that unique. I don't even remember what the amp was, either a TC Electronic BH250 or a GK MB200, nothing particularly special. However, that Phil Jones cabinet articulates like nothing else I've ever heard. It's not boomy or muddy in any way whatsoever, unless you intentionally shape your tone that way. My tone wasn't shaped that way. My tone was scooped. And my friend heard it in a room full of bass players.
Soooooo... From that, I conclude that if my bass through my amp can be heard in a roomful of other basses through other amps, it's not going to have any trouble being heard with a guitar and drums playing. The key for me is how articulate your amp & cab is capable of being. If it's just an average amp & cab, you might have to bump up the mids. I don't have to.
Yes, miss the old school fundamental bass playing! I guess the lead guitar plays the root!!
I never scoop my mids!! I always just do a little boost the bass and treble -- that sounds way better than scooping the mids.
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IMO, and IME, a scoop in the mids is one of the best ways to get a great bass tone.
The place this goes wrong is when you start making really drastic EQ changes and/or when the Q is to narrow.
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If your bass has two pickups, and you are using both, you have a scoop in your mids.
"Mids" is a big category. Cutting or boosting 600Hz is quite different that cutting or boosting 3KHz.
When you boost in one area, you are effectively cutting another and vice versa. This is where your gain comes in as a tone control.
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I'll also add that, IMO, boosting your mids can absolutely ruin a mix. If you are cutting through a mix, then you are not part of the mix.
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IMO, and IME, a scoop in the mids is one of the best ways to get a great bass tone.
The place this goes wrong is when you start making really drastic EQ changes and/or when the Q is to narrow.
--------
If your bass has two pickups, and you are using both, you have a scoop in your mids.
"Mids" is a big category. Cutting or boosting 600Hz is quite different that cutting or boosting 3KHz.
When you boost in one area, you are effectively cutting another and vice versa. This is where your gain comes in as a tone control.
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I'll also add that, IMO, boosting your mids can absolutely ruin a mix. If you are cutting through a mix, then you are not part of the mix.
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Interesting. I had a similar experience once at the grand opening of the old Mars store in Virginia Beach back in the late 1990s-early 2000s. If you recall, Mars was a massive chain music store, like GC. They didn't last. At the grand opening, there were a hundred guitarists all thrashing away with that scooped distortion tone. I took down a big Epiphone archtop and plugged it into a clean Fender Twin with the EQ set flat, except with the low end rolled off. I started playing "Night and Day" chord-melody style and every head turned. You could hear that guitar perfectly over the din, clean as a bell.
Wow you totally missed the joke; which was "Scooping the Mids" is often thought of around here as something you just don't do, like dating your sister. LOL FWIW I don't have a sister so this was never a possibility for me.
Related to this same notion around here a lot is "why would you take an amp head to a gig that weighs more than 8 pounds?".
Sly Stone said it, then Yamaha appropriated the phrase when they were selling two stroke and four stroke motorcycles - "different strokes for different folks".
Like I said the reason tone controls exist on bass amps is to tailor the sound to your band, the venue, the bass you are playing and the cabinets you are using. There is no "right answer" for every player.
Analogeezer
Personally, I like mid scooped with some low mids added back in. Not honky, but stlll cuts through but with some heft. Not a fan of much mids or upper mids. I like my bass to sound and feel like a bass.
Depends on the centre frequency of the EQ. Reducing low-mids may clear up room resonances, while reducing high-mids could reduce the clarity.
I usually start out flat, and work from there. On an Ampeg I often end up boosting a bit of bass, high-mid, and treble (effectively scooping out the low-mids a bit). On a Hartke I often boost bass and treble, and slightly cut the mids (centred at a lower frequency). Either way it's totally heard in a rehearsal mix.
I usually start out flat, and work from there. On an Ampeg I often end up boosting a bit of bass, high-mid, and treble (effectively scooping out the low-mids a bit). On a Hartke I often boost bass and treble, and slightly cut the mids (centred at a lower frequency). Either way it's totally heard in a rehearsal mix.
This.....EXACTLY THIS.
When I first decided to modernize my gear in the late 90's (I had been using a Rick 4003 and a Charvel P-J Star bass for some time) I figured I needed to get into the modern thing and get an active bass. So I bought an Ibanez SR-1200 which sounds great.
The band I was in at the time never made it out of the basement (substance abuse problems with many of the members) but we played what I would call blues rock (the guitarist) and pop rock (the keyboard player) originals.
That bass worked great for that situation.
The next band I was in was a prog rock trio with no guitar, mostly originals but also prog rock covers. The keyboard player was a total Emerson fiend (which is why I loved the guy) and played heavy left hand parts, loud ostinatos with lots of low end.
The Ibanez still worked with that band but then I bought a Geddy Lee Jazz bass because of well "Geddy factor" and also I had never owned a Jazz. Seemed to me if I was going to own a jazz that was the one to get.
So I bring that over to practice and it was instantly obvious to me that bass worked a lot better in that band. I was not laying down a lot of low end that competed with the keyboard player.
We played for about an hour, then took a break and the other two guys were saying how great the Jazz bass sounded. They had never complained about the Ibanez, but they certainly realized the Jazz bass just worked better with that band.
The band after that, was a cover band with two guitars (but the singer mainly played acoustic, he played electric on maybe 10% of the material, acoustic on 70% and just stand up vocals on the rest), drums and bass.
We played "classic rock" and beyond, from 1960's to 2000's stuff (everything from Creedence to Lenny Kravitz and Foo Fighters.
I initially auditioned and joined the band with the GL Jazz bass. So about three weeks in as we are building sets and learning songs I brought over the Ibanez; mainly because I was talking guitars with the guitar players and told them about it (it's a very purty bass, transparent black with a curly maple top).
So of course I plug it up to try it for a set and when we got done the rest of the band were like "wow you should use that bass, it sounds a lot better"
Truth was it sounded different, not "better" but for that band without all the low end from a keyboard player it worked "better".
So yeah, material, instrumentation, and many other factors influence what tone you go for and if you need less mids or more mids.
It's kinda why they make different basses and amps really; if you only play in bands with the same style over and over one setup will work but sometimes your requirements change.
Analogeezer
I didn't miss the point. I was making a joke of the sister phrase hence the joke about P basses and Tort.
I was actually also spoofing on TB because of trends that can become gospel.
I've been playing too long and living long enough to have found my way. May we all.
Try shaving with earplugs in your ears and you'll see how much you really hear with your face.
drumvsbass
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It's the balance between being heard, or felt. Scooping the mids isn't necessarily the problem. Over scooping the mids is.
