Tone Basics - your thoughts

[Conan]

[quote name='bigjohn' timestamp='1392389201' post='2368067']

[/quote]

Not meant to be confrontational, honest! I'm just interested to hear where JTUK gets that opinion from. It is rather a sweeping generalisation, but maybe he has seen/heard a lot of bass players with awful tones...

Edited February 14, 2014 by Conan

[The Dark Lord]

I think it is simple. The tone is in your head. Your "good basic rock tone" is probably entirely different from mine. The ideal tone in your head has been put there by years of listening to the music you like.

Now, you've got to buy and sell amps, pedals and basses on a trial basis, after to listening to the advice of others too - and one day you will hit on the kinda thing you need.

For my tone, given the equipment you say you have, I'd set everything to the middle, then roll the bass up a bit and wind the treble up a lot. Set all controls on your bass on full bore ....... and then do something to make it one the edge of breakup when I dig in (which often involves a pedal to be fair).

But's that's just me.

Edited February 14, 2014 by The Dark Lord

[JTUK]

[quote name='Conan' timestamp='1392389542' post='2368074']
Not meant to be confrontational, honest! I'm just interested to hear where JTUK gets that opinion from. It is rather a sweeping generalisation, but maybe he has seen/heard a lot of bass players with awful tones...
[/quote]

Well, I do see a lot of bass players.... and a lot of them don't know what they are doing... IMO.
If I said that applied to 80% of the bass players than I see...and "assumed" that that figure was typical and therefore may transfer over to
any place that accumulated bass players, then yeah, you could apply that here.
The difference is that I don't get to hear them here so can't know who that applies to specifically
but reading a few posts here and there, you get a kind of feel of what to expect.

[PaulWarning]

you've not got a lot of control over your tone when going through a PA, it's what the sound engineer thinks you should sound like, although I do hear a some bass players with way too much low bass dialed in (imo of course) which results in either a boomy sound or one with no definition or both

[Lozz196]

In the band that I was in with 2 bassists we used to explain that one was meant to be old-school low/thuddy, the other was twangy and distorted. Never made a bit of difference, both made to sound the same, irrespective of what venue we played. So we both made the decision to use DI Pedals to shape our tone, using our amps as power amps only. It worked, we could then get our respective sounds out front. Also made it a lot easier when using provided rigs.

[jazzyvee]

[quote name='The Dark Lord' timestamp='1392390210' post='2368094']
I think it is simple. The tone is in your head. Your "good basic rock tone" is probably entirely different from mine. The ideal tone in your head has been put there by years of listening to the music you like.

Now, you've got to buy and sell amps, pedals and basses on a trial basis, after to listening to the advice of others too - and one day you will hit on the kinda thing you need.
[/quote]

Then you need a sound guy who understands your tone and tries at least to give you that out front rather than giving you the same bass sound as every other bass player that comes through his desk.