do we really hear what we think we hear.

[nofi]

recently i played a recording for a friend. i was playing my olympia abg with coated round wound strings. afterwards he commented that it sounded like an upright to him. to me it didn't even sound close to an upright. his remark made me wonder if we are so absorbed in our own bass 'sound' that we may fail to hear it as others might. a question to ponder , i think.

[Barklessdog]

Definitely not. Your ears have to be trained, plus the fact the varying amounts of damage one has done to your ears over the years makes differences.

[rahock]

I had an electric /acoustic jam the other night and got pretty much the same response from everyone. I had some pretty good players around too. I will say that my Olympia , with La'Bella tapes, running through a 400 watt Seymour Duncan head with the bass boost on , and an Avatar 2 12" cab does have a very uprightish sound.
Does it sound just like an upright? No....but it gets a whole lot closer than you're going to get with just about anything else. It gets a very woody and dark sound with a bit of natural echo type resonance that you're not going to get from surface mounted pickups on a solid or semi hollow body electric.
You can't go nuts with the volume at the EQ setting that I was using or it will howl so bad it will give you nightmares. It has a very uprightlike sound, but to me, it isn't 100% even though everyone tells me it is.

Rick

[Dave W]

We do get absorbed in our own sound, but that doesn't mean that other listeners have enough knowledge to identify what they're hearing and describe it to us. Most of the time I'll trust my own ears.

[Tim Armstrong]

I usually trust my own ears, but I've had times, usually when general fatigue has a grip on me, where my ability to hear pitch starts to go!  Just last night, during the fourth gig in three days, my bass sounded significantly sharp to me, even though the tuner said I was right on.  Well, tuners can lie, so I asked my bandmates and they both said I was just fine, and no one in the audience had that "there's something wrong" look on their faces, either.

I had that problem all through the first set, and then, after a break, my hearing returned to normal, and it all sounded good again...

Weird!

Tim

[rahock]

I've been having  the same type of pitch issues on and off for a few years. I'll  often hear something tuning up that won't agree with what the tuner says. Others say it sounds right to them , but I'm obligated to argue  ;)Then when I start playing everything blends perfectly in the mix
WTF, It's almost as if I was wrong

I dunno , these old ears have been through a lot of abuse. It's nice to hear I'm not the only one who experiences this.

Rick