I know I'm asking for trouble with a thread title like this, but I'm not making it up:
I wasn't planning on starting a new topic, but I put a lot of work in to document the two positions of the infamous "suck switch" found on early-'70s Guild basses for the "Let's Talk Guild" forum, so I'm just going to repeat the post here.
Or, you can read the original post here.
With ProTools LE 8.0.1 I recorded my
M-85 II fretless in each position. I played both fingers and pick, but for the sake of this demo I just included fingers, with my thumb resting on the corner of the fretboard. I recorded each position - the neck pickup soloed in each "suck switch" position, then with both pickups in each position, then just the bridge pickup. I also used the EQ section of a mastering program called
Ozone (the link is version 5, I'm still using Ozone 3) to capture a snapshot of the EQ curve of one of the notes. I also have a screenshot of the two switch positions next to each other for another (albeit less accurate) visual.
So first, here are the soundclips. Position A is with the switch up (towards the bass side), Position B is with the switch down (towards the treble side) - I think this matches Frono's terminology in previous posts in this thread.
So far so good - use your ears to listen to the various positions in relation to each other. My subjective impressions from just playing the bass since I got it were that 1) the A position is much bassier than the B position, and 2) the neck in position B and the bridge by itself sound really thin.
Then I decided to take a screen shot of some of the soundclips in ProTools:
The top is the neck in the A position, the bottom in the B.
The problem with the signal images in ProTools is that amplitude and frequency are combined, so peaks aren't necessarily related to only one or the other. But you can still get the basic idea that the two settings have some differences. You can see that neck B is louder - when recording I didn't use any compression and just played each clip without any gain adjustments. See Granny Gremlin's comments later on in the thread.
So I used the EQ section of Ozone to take "snapshots" of the low A being played at the 5th fret of the E string. In this first image, the purple curve is the neck pup in the A position and the yellow curve is the neck pup in the B position:
The lowest frequency is several decibels lower in the B position, while the midrange from about 200 hz and up is higher. You can really hear it in the soundclips.
In this second image, the purple curve again is the neck pickup in the A position, and the white curve is both pickups with the switch in the A position:
With both pickups, you retain the bass, but still get increased midrange/treble response, though there's still not a lot of treble.
Ideally I would provide snapshots of each position, each note even! But I didn't get that far. This will hopefully help illustrate the differences between the two settings of the suck switch. There is still a lot of work to be done, but this is a start.