Double Bass Where does "boxy" live?

[playbass0410]

I got to mess around a bit more today and it wasn't that tough to recreate the boxy sound. Sure enough, Studiodawg, right in the 450hz range. Strangely, even when I dropped that area -12dB, I could still get it to do it with an extra hard pluck in the sonic range I described before. Changing my plucking a bit cleaned it up but not sure I want to have to remember the 4 notes I have to pluck differently

How did you "drop that area" by -12dB?
The only way I know of to tame undesired sound colorations is by using a decent full parametertric multi-band EQ. Creating a steep notch up-curve and sweep the frequency until the "boxy" is up in the face. Then inverse the curve for being a down-notch, play with Q-factor and with the damping. Eventually you have to do this in the harmonics with another EQ-band.

Doing so I can get rid of every troubeling coloration or feedback, even with extreme room acoustics. Only drawback - its taking a lot of time and experience.

A word to the Fishman Platinum: I have had this device and ditched it soon. It simply deathened my sound and its EQ bands never helped. I always messed around with it to get a good sound. Only when I bypassed it I realized what the big troublemaker in my chain has been - the Fishman...

 

[drurb]

How did you "drop that area" by -12dB?
The only way I know of to tame undesired sound colorations is by using a decent full parametertric multi-band EQ. Creating a steep notch up-curve and sweep the frequency until the "boxy" is up in the face. Then inverse the curve for being a down-notch, play with Q-factor and with the damping. Eventually you have to do this in the harmonics with another EQ-band.

I've championed parametric tone shaping here many, many times. Still, attenuating (dropping) a frequency region can be done with a good old "graphic eq." circuit but without the flexibility of being able to control the center frequency and bandwidth of the filter precisely.

Large corrections on the order of 12 dB can produce other artifacts and I'd say that if one has to routinely cut or boost a band by that amount, one would be better off improving/changing the source, just as Greg said here.

 

[Nate74]

How did you "drop that area" by -12dB?

I used the parametric EQ on my ToneBone PZ-Pre. No Q control though.

I agree completely with drurb, and would not see a -12db as a realistic thing to have to do to get a proper tone. But it did let me discover pretty closely the range causing the issue.

While I'm not completely read to ditch the Fishman, with the ToneBone and a K&K PLUS a FDeck unit on the way, it may soon come to that. My sincere hope when I got the Clarus was to be able to eliminate a preamp from my chain, but it may not be possible.