Sam - For probably 75 - 80% of my playing on the MK, (looking directly at the bass from in front) I have the pan at 1 o'clock i.e. slightly favouring the neck pup, both filters at around 3 o'clock and both Q switches on. For numbers that require less aggression it's usually just a case of flicking the Qs off and maybe rolling the bridge filter back to 1 o'clock. very occasionally, I may need to add some bite to the standard tone so all I do is roll the pan round to 11 o'clock and add some bridge filter. It's worth mentioning that we're a rock covers band but we're playing some pretty modern stuff - killers, Muse, the enemy - as well as older classics from the stones, beatles, bad company etc, so it's nice having a bass that'll cope with just about any tone needed with minimal 'tweaking'. Sadly we don't pay any funk so I don't need a slap tone but that's probably the 'basic' tone of the instrument;-)
Another point to make is that my amp set up now colours the tone anyway. I'm running 2 preamps into a stereo power amp into a pair of identical EBS 2x12 cabinets. I was at one point trying to get a distorted tone using a footswitch but all the pedals I tried were too buzzy so I've invested in an ampeg SVP to give one channel some drive when it's required - it's also tightened the tone up to be more punchy, prior to getting the SVP I was running both channels from a fender tbp preamp which is great for getting a nice phat bottom end but struggles to cope with the upper register.
A picture (so they say) is worth a thousand words...
Hopefully I'll get to california in a couple of years (big birthday trip) so maybe we'll get the chance to meet up. Once I've finalised my arangements i'm going to convince bill panzer he should organise another Alembic get together;-) Visiting the workshop is no.1. on my list.
Graeme
