Mudbucker article (fiendishly derailed by Uwe into unmotivated The Who attack!)

[uwe]

Light and whimsical? Maybe. My objection is that he's dead wrong on just about every point he touches. Of course Jack Bruce always sounds like Jack Bruce, but his EB-3 tone is nothing like what a mudbucker sounds like. I don't profess to know how much if any of the mudbucker is in there but you can't get that kind of midrange out of a mudbucker.

Real mudbucker tone that's easy to pick out:

Of course. And not all mudbuckers of all eras sound the same either.  Whether JB needed the minibucker (not that that is a good pup!) to create his sound or not I don't know either, you read different things about it, but in the reunion gigs with Cream he certainly got a similar sound with a single neck pup EB-1 (a fifties, i.e. single coil one though, not the true mudbucker 69 version).

[the mojo hobo]

Light and whimsical? Maybe. My objection is that he's dead wrong on just about every point he touches. Of course Jack Bruce always sounds like Jack Bruce, but his EB-3 tone is nothing like what a mudbucker sounds like. I don't profess to know how much if any of the mudbucker is in there but you can't get that kind of midrange out of a mudbucker.

Real mudbucker tone that's easy to pick out:

Dave, thanks for posting that. He sounds great on a Thunderbird too:

[the mojo hobo]

And until Dave posted that video I too thought the mudbucker tone less than desirable, at least in the context of rock and roll. With Cream, Free, Mountian, et al the bass tone is more the result of overdriven tube amplifiers than choice of pickups.

[4stringer77]

This sounds desirable to me.

[Highlander]

I have finally attacked the holy cow of this forum...

Has Uwe Peter cooked his goose step ...?

Same time, same channel...

[uwe]

I'm disappointed, I expected more outrage and venomous hate!!! 

[Pilgrim]

I'm disappointed, I expected more outrage and venomous hate!!!  

Lessee....I had a bottle of venomous hate around here somm'ers......if I recall, it was an IPA with extra hops.  

[patman]

I'm a Fender guy, and I don't particularly like JAE's tone on Live at Leeds.

I think in general, P-bass tone is fat enough to fill a room, though...with a very articulate high end. It's a p-bass thing...doesn't have to sound like an airplane taking off.

The jazz/blues video above has a tone to die for...makes me want to try a Gibson again (been a long time).  So did Scott's last video. Excellent tone.

[uwe]

"P-bass tone is fat enough to fill a room"

On the E and A, yes, it has its limits on the D and G. That is where a mudbucky Gibson hobbitses bass just fills more. And Jack played a lot on the D and G, wouldn't have sounded the same on a Fender P nor filled the music as much.

The P Bass conquered the bass world because it decided on the - to most bassists at least - more important pair of strings to sound better!  

[the mojo hobo]

"P-bass tone is fat enough to fill a room"

On the E and A, yes, it has its limits on the D and G. That is where a mudbucky Gibson hobbitses bass just fills more. And Jack played a lot on the D and G, wouldn't have sounded the same on a Fender P nor filled the music as much.

The P Bass conquered the bass world because it decided on the - to most bassists at least - more important pair of strings to sound better!  

That is just nonsense.

Why did we never see this guy with a mudbucker? He played a lot on the D and G too.

[uwe]

I was talking about scale length (hence the "hobbitses" remark), not just pup choice! JAE was never much of a short scale man except in his early days when shorties were still more common. And when he was playing higher notes I never found him especially full-sounding either, just very audible (= loud!) and fast. (To be fair, a lot of JAE's speedy runs would have simply not even been heard with a sluggish mudbucker sound.)

There is a warmth and density in tone to a short scale D and G that long scales have a hard time matching, just as a short scale E will always battle to have as much authority as a long scale E.

Counter-question: Why did Mel Schacher and Billy Sheehan put mudbuckers in the neck positions of their Fenders? I don't believe they wanted to sound thinner and more trebly with them.  

[Dave W]

Dave, thanks for posting that. He sounds great on a Thunderbird too:

He does, although I think the mudbucker tone works better for their music.

And until Dave posted that video I too thought the mudbucker tone less than desirable, at least in the context of rock and roll. With Cream, Free, Mountian, et al the bass tone is more the result of overdriven tube amplifiers than choice of pickups.

The amps were a good part of it for sure, Felix' tone was usually overdriven and not well defined, but I always assumed Jack Bruce's tone to be mostly from the mini-humbucker. Then in the late 90s I read Graeme Pattingale's Cream site in the late 90s which confirmed it, if you assume that his research is accurate. Don't know about Free (never a fan).

At any rate, it might not work for all situations but the Black Dub video shows you can get a nice deep sound that's nothing like the unrecognizable mud some people would have you believe.

[patman]

Had a teacher years ago that played jazz on a variety of mud-bucker equipped Gibsons.  He always sounded great. Through a B-15.

My one foray into owning a Ripper (for maybe a week or two).  Showed me that a Gibson could be a real bitch to eq in a larger room. I used it on one gig in a high school gym in maybe 1975...and it just roared through my Acoustic Amp. Traded it in the next day on a P-Bass.  Maybe this just shows how far amplification has come in 30-40 years.  Course I sort of wonder how the band in the video above would sound in a large theater with the mud-bucker equipped bass.

[4stringer77]

Dave, being a bassist who doesn't like Free is like being a duck that hates water. As much as I love Cream, Andy Fraser was a technically superior bassist IMO. I'd say he was getting most of his sound from the mini-bucker as well. Even though he used almost the identical set up as Jack, he had a way more focused live sound. This was due to his Jaco-esque right hand over the bridge pickup style for the most part and also because he didn't crank up the vol. on as many stacks as Jack.

[uwe]

"Dave, being a bassist who doesn't like Free is like being a duck that hates water."




I'm no Free nut - Paul Rodgers is a great singer, but sometimes a little too safe for my taste, I prefer singers who sometimes take a risk, without overstretching all the time -, but Fraser was gifted, especially considering that he was still a kid back then. But technically superior to Jack Bruce? With Fraser you heard where he was coming from (nothing bad about that), the Motown influence and all, but Jack Bruce sounded like no one before or even after him. His playing defies analysis, is hugely intuitive and kinda strange. Actually, I probably like Fraser better as a bassist, but Jack Bruce is a lot more idiosyncratic. That is what I always liked about Baker and Bruce as a team: They drummed and played bass like no one else, they had that free-flow jazzy thing going on. Not commercial at all by standards then and even less by today's standards, but they gave Cream a feverish urgency which Free was devoid of. Fraser, Rodgers, Kirke and Kossoff always tried to sound as if they were 10 years more mature than they actually were.

Or let's put it that way: Cream sounded and Jack Bruce sounded like they/he took the more interesting drugs!