Any tips on how to hear yourself when you play fretless live ?.

[Guest bassman7755]

Ive owned a few fretless basses for a couple of years now, always use them when playing at home but only ever played on stage in a band with one once.

I just cant work out how people manage to hear themselves well enough to keep good intonation. This is something I've always struggled with in general as I am bit OCD about being able to hear myself very clearly live. I used a rh450/midget-t/compact rig but thinking of getting some sort of personal monitoring either in-ear or something like one of those warfdale mini vocal monitors to perch on top of my rig to bean sound directly at my head.

Edited October 29, 2012 by bassman7755

[chrismuzz]

Pointing speakers at ears will help, as will experimenting with adding some midrange

[Kongo]

I use fretless basses even in metal where it's easy to get buried, I feel ya on needing to hear yourself. after all, how can you tell what people are hearing if you cannot?
Midrange is your friend as is monitoring. In-ear monitoring would be awesome then you'll know for sure. It's a bit scary once you get up there, unlike fretted you can't poorly fret (those moments when you barely caught the note) but worse of all is you seem to become even more concious about what your doing, which in itself can make you mess up and thus, be out of tune.

[fretmeister]

Buy the guitarist a working tuner.

[ikay]

[quote name='fretmeister' timestamp='1351555846' post='1852696']
Buy the guitarist a working tuner.
[/quote]

+1 haha nothing like the guitarist tuning themselves to a randomly selected string to mess with your head on fretless

[wombatboter]

A nice midtone helps in any situation..
Fretless playing is always a challenge because you have to keep the other instruments as a reference and have to work around them...
I've played with piano-players who were really picky about intonation but luckily didn't have too many complaints..
Being able to play with a clear sound of your own bass and enough information of the other instruments and it should make things easy enough to pull it off..
Having lined-fretless basses also is a great help..