The Last Bass Outpost
Main Forums => The Bass Zone => Topic started by: Freakbassman on September 07, 2016, 05:47:59 AM
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As a player for more than 40 years I've used many different basses for different songs as needed. Sometimes Chris Squire-ish. Sometimes Jack Bruce-ish. sometimes very bottom-ish. But I've noticed with the use of sub-woofers more and more the sound difference to on-stage sound and FOH( front-of-house) is dramatic. If I'm midrangie like Jack Bruce there's always lots of bottom on my FOH sound. Does this bother anyone else?
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I've wondered about that as well. It may be a function of the crossover point on the PA. As i understand it, the subs are just only picking up the frequencies below the crossover point. That would explain why you sound all boomy through the subs?
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I think it has more to do with the guy twisting the knobs than the equipment used. We had a sound company here that did all the festivals and the bass was always all bottom, often indistinguishable from the kick drum. The last time I saw them was at a blues festival with a famous artist headlining. A bit before they were to come on their knob twisted took over the board and very soon after the bass was coming through in the mix like I thought it should all along. I think many sound guys these days mix so the kick drum is prominent and don't really care about the bass guitar.
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I think it has more to do with the guy twisting the knobs than the equipment used. We had a sound company here that did all the festivals and the bass was always all bottom, often indistinguishable from the kick drum. The last time I saw them was at a blues festival with a famous artist headlining. A bit before they were to come on their knob twisted took over the board and very soon after the bass was coming through in the mix like I thought it should all along. I think many sound guys these days mix so the kick drum is prominent and don't really care about the bass guitar.
+1!
Somehow many sound engineers seem to get a kick out of causing small earthquakes with their sub lows. Rather than projecting a decent balanced sound.
I'm not interested in a bass drum sound that can grind kidney stones. I want to hear what the band is playing.
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This is a point that's been annoying me a lot lately. A lot of sound guys, especially younger ones, have no idea how to mix bass, or how much a boost in volume and highs can help the sound of a band. Especially a 3 piece where there are literally only 2 melodic instruments in the band. A lot of it comes down to laziness and wanting to homogenize every band. Keep the bass buried - no need to worry about it. It just needs to be a dull thump in the background. :rolleyes: Sometimes I just wanna tell these guys to stick their head in front of my amp and tell them "THIS is what it's supposed to sound like!" Or maybe buy them a copy of Live at Leeds or All the World's a Stage.
Having said all that, there ARE guys who get it, and really do care. But unless you're paying a guy to mix all your shows, it's a crap shoot.
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Yep all around.
I was at a ZZ Top show last Sunday night. The bass sounded great when we were standing. But when I sat down and then leaned over to fetch my beer, there was that boomy thump of bass and kick drum. (The subs were below the stage.)
So the crossover was working but the sound crew was good enough to compensate with a lot of mids and high frequencies through the array.
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I think subs are the most grossly misused speakers. Too many sound guys think bass equals thump at extreme volume with no musical quality. The result is that you can't hear the bass - it's covered. Sux. I'm not a fan, and would rather they were left out.
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... Or maybe buy them a copy of Live at Leeds or All the World's a Stage...
:mrgreen:
I vaguely remember Uwe mentioning using an 18" cab on stage FOR sub lows...
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I think it's a reflection of more and more sound guys having come up through rave and EDM where that's where a lot of the tune's identity lives.
also having worked extensively in that scene there is very much a culture of the bass not being right unless you can feel it in your sternum(bowels?)
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I think it's a reflection of more and more sound guys having come up through rave and EDM where that's where a lot of the tune's identity lives.
also having worked extensively in that scene there is very much a culture of the bass not being right unless you can feel it in your sternum(bowels?)
This, and trying to recreate the bass thumping sound of a car stereo or overpriced low quality headphones with a built in bass boost.
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IMO, it's a result of the lazy incompetence that soundguys have always had coupled with the fact that modern speakers can now have huge output in low end. Mixing electric bass guitar properly is one of the most difficult instruments to deal with in a live situation and rather than learn how, the easy thing to do is overpower the low end and make the bass, along with the kick drum, into a gigantic drum machine sound. Most distorted guitars are also chainsaw buzz capable of inducing earbleed at 4kHz and the lead vocal is generally buried under a repeating delay mistimed with the actual acoustics of the venue enough to make it mostly unintelligible even though its being produced at threshold-of-pain volume.
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I've also noticed that subwoofer design is not at all bassist-friendly. The typical folded horn has very uneven response with very loud peaks. Great for getting the kick drum to knock your head off at a hundred paces. Terrible for communicating a melodic idea with any dynamic control.
It's even worse in indoor venues. Either the space is small, in which case there are usually strong peaky room resonances at frequencies that will make the bass boom way too loudly on some notes, or the space is big, in which case the low end has long reverb time at nearly any frequency, turning everything into mush. Both problems are very impractical to fix with acoustic treatment - lows are hard to absorb. If the room wasn't designed for good lows (they never are), you only get good low-frequency acoustics by miraculous accident. Your best hope is a very articulate and flat-as-possible low frequency speaker system, so at least the sound at the source is clear. And as a rule that is not what subwoofers are. Bad acoustics plus bad speakers has predictable results.
It's also true as others have noted that a bad engineer can ruin any venue or gear no matter how good they are. I remember that back in the day, CBGB's was the first venue where I ever actually heard decent live sound. I had heard some pretty awfully amplified local live music growing up on Long Island, but my first real club show was Living Colour at CBGBs in 1987, just before their first album came out. They were amazing in that small room and I could hear everything with perfect clarity. Most times that I went back there, it was excellent sound from anywhere in the room. There were one or two notable exceptions, where the usual clarity and power turned into painful booming mush. Same exact gear - I don't know about board, amps, etc. but they didn't change the PA cabs for literally decades - so I can only assume it was a particularly bad engineer.
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I hear it a lot on festivals. You see a bassist play a melodic line and you just hear one low ooomph... In normal clubs and venues it's better I guess. I even think the worst part is over and some sound engineers try to let you hear the bass lines again. It also depends on the sound engineer and the band of course.
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I find it interesting that on a forum of bass players there are so many that agree that there is such a thing as too much bottom. When you get mixed in to major sub woofer bottom you lose all note definition and it makes your head hurt. If you play nothing but root notes it can allow you a real strong bottom end, and that's good , but it still makes your head hurt, and that's still bad.
Rick
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I find it interesting that on a forum of bass players there are so many that agree that there is such a thing as too much bottom. When you get mixed in to major sub woofer bottom you lose all note definition and it makes your head hurt. If you play nothing but root notes it can allow you a real strong bottom end, and that's good , but it still makes your head hurt, and that's still bad.
Rick
That sums it up pretty well. Bass needs to be musical, not just impact and thump.
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With all the real time analysis tools around today ( I have a spectrum analyser on my cellphone FFS ) a sound engineer who cant calibrate a pa system to not have a monstrously over hyped bottom end really needs to ask an adult how its done. Loud and mushy bass is no substitute for bringing enough subs/ amps to do the job properly either.I will use a preamp lineout at venues where the f.o.h. has been tuned by a rational human but I put a mike on my top 15 (bit less lows in that one) if its bass pudding out there.
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The more I ponder what you all write, the more I believe that the crossover is what is killing us, when a rookie or house-mix guy or just-earning -a-couple-of-bucks person or, God forbid, a guitar player is in charge if the board!
The bass signal gets split and everything above the cut point is ignored and/or squelched.
Ah well..
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If it were just the crossover frequency, there would still be a larger "hole" in the mid and upper bass regions, but you'll also notice that guitars still have tons of beef. The overwhelming "low end " we're fussing over is actually in the mid-bass region around 100Hz and maybe going as high as 180 and as low as 60 if the knob-twiddler has decent subs. 100Hz is just at low G on a guitar, but because of drum machines and bad EDM/industrial music and the plethora of consumer electronics assigning it as an arbitrary "low frequency," it's almost always boosted, both on the master house EQ curve and the individual channels, by bad soundguys to make guitars chunk and drums boom. Bass is an afterthought and usually becomes some sort of rolling murmur shadowing the kick and floor toms. REAL good, tight low end takes lots of speaker area and power and very, very few PA setups outside of a stadium array are even capable of producing, much less accurately reproducing it consistent with the rest of program audio, at all. ...so the knob-twiddler guns the 100Hz to get "more bass" and the sound turns to mush.
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PBG - what cut frequency would produce better bass sound?
Thanks.
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I think some younger FOH guys think bass is always low. You mix in the left hand of the keyboard and the power driven guitar and all of a sudden its the bass that's too loud. Let alone add the bass drum into the mix. I was playing a worship service in church when the Pastor came in and said the bass was too loud. Turned out the sound guys where playing a click track for the drummer and forgot to turn it off the FOH. Sound guys said sorry but no apology from the pastor.
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PBG - what cut frequency would produce better bass sound?
Thanks.
150-180Hz can be particularly troublesome; it's "woofy" enough to sound bassy but almost ALL cabinets are comparatively too efficient in this region and it's high enough to have directional characteristics, which means if multiple cabs are producing it, (stage/subs/mains) it's being phase-smeared and introducing a whole set of audio peaks and troughs that would be totally absent in a properly tuned and run system. Be careful though; 220-250Hz is where the bulk of the midrange meat of a bass tone lies and if you cut excessively there, the bass will be even more indistinct.
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150-180Hz can be particularly troublesome; it's "woofy" enough to sound bassy but almost ALL cabinets are comparatively too efficient in this region and it's high enough to have directional characteristics, which means if multiple cabs are producing it, (stage/subs/mains) it's being phase-smeared and introducing a whole set of audio peaks and troughs that would be totally absent in a properly tuned and run system. Be careful though; 220-250Hz is where the bulk of the midrange meat of a bass tone lies and if you cut excessively there, the bass will be even more indistinct.
Thanks for the tip. 150 - 180 is also low enough to be fundamentals of notes you might actually play (I think D on the G string is pretty near 150)... So if you experiment with cutting around there, check that playing up the neck still sounds OK. Fortunately, I don't think I've ever had trouble with those notes being not loud enough :)
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:mrgreen:
I vaguely remember Uwe mentioning using an 18" cab on stage FOR sub lows...
In rehearsal rooms because I can then wank soundwise (I love the feel of being immersed in sublows), but not on stage. Hearing yourself on stage is more important than having your balls rumbled.
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150-180Hz can be particularly troublesome; it's "woofy" enough to sound bassy but almost ALL cabinets are comparatively too efficient in this region and it's high enough to have directional characteristics, which means if multiple cabs are producing it, (stage/subs/mains) it's being phase-smeared and introducing a whole set of audio peaks and troughs that would be totally absent in a properly tuned and run system. Be careful though; 220-250Hz is where the bulk of the midrange meat of a bass tone lies and if you cut excessively there, the bass will be even more indistinct.
I realize I worded my question wrong. (Rather than cut, I should have said cut over.) But what I really meant to ask is what is a good crossover point to set on the PA?
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Crossover varies with the tops, subs, and the room. There are way too many variables to recommend a one-size-fits-most PA crossover point. Once you've established where the generally optimal point lies, the speakers, crossover included, have to be tuned to the room by tweaking. Most crossovers are either set way too high or low: too high is easy because most subs will happily reproduce low mids, but the lows suffer (though most folks never notice), and too low of a cutoff frequency is bit more complicated; the subs will generally be swallowed because in general with consumer MI stuff, you need four times the boxes and power you have for real true lows. A lot of times in troublesome rooms, a parametric EQ is employed WITH the house graphic EQ: the graphic can be set to the raw speaker response and the parametric compensates for the room- BUT just like gain staging, doing all this stuff properly is an art unto itself. I've never had to use one for that reason, although I have had to dial in massive cuts on digital EQ's that have both using both at once for really bad upper midrange spikes (common in rooms, mics, and speakers). The mix itself should be tailored to the acoustics of the room and many, many "producer" soundguys seem to have no clue that what comes out of the PA speakers should augment rather than overpower stage volume that is already there.
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Thank you sir!!
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Thanks PBM.
You can land more gigs if you can provide sound. But most bands don't want to pay a sound man a share. Or a set fee.
It can be really contentious, but your post above shows why it can be really worthwhile.... IF the person is good.
Ah well.