Too much Mids?

[jazzyvee]

I did a gig last night with my maple Europa 5. I was depping with a Drifters tribute band so it was mostly classic soul and my sound didn't need much change in eq on the bass for those. However a few of the more lively cover tracks by Kool and the gang, The real thing and Billy ocean I opened the filters slightly to get a bit more uppers in the mix. My bass rig was my mesa boogie rig and the settings are not changed from what I use for my all my gigs as I like to do my tone changes from the bass during a gig when needed.


Anyway after the gig the drummer said to me that he thought my sound was too middly. That seemed odd to me as I apart from reggae gigs I try to get what I consider a appro sound from my bass and that includes having information across the frequency spectrum. I know most of his gigs are with bass players that play fender or fender style Jazz basses and use that scooped sound so I wonder if him hearing lots of mids from me is because that is what is usually missing on his other gigs


I can't say that I always get my tones right yet but I certainly didn't have the filters anywhere near half way open and no Q was needed either so I didn't consider my tone to be bright or overtly middly.


Any thoughts?

[lbpesq]

Jazzy, I wouldn't worry too much about one Fender-indoctrinated drummer's opinion.  I mean, he is a drummer, right?

Bill, tgo

[jazzyvee]

lol, Bill you may be correct however he does have a really good ear.  He also knows my basses as he also plays in my regular band and loves the sound. :-) As I am also interested in finding the right sound for the music I get called to play I do listen to constructive comments from other musicians unless I know they deliberately expressing a strong brand bias against what I have. Then I listen and ignore. :-).

[keith_h]

Was he talking for the full gig or just those songs?

It could be the venue. If he was concerned just about those songs you might just need to scoop the mids a bit more or open up the filter more for where you played. It could also be the drummers position on stage. I had a situation where the room I was playing in was accentuating the lower notes of the rhythm guitar. The drummer kept trying to say it was me until I showed him I had turned my amp down all of the way (amp was for on stage monitoring only). The key is always what it sounds like out front and not on stage. If stage sound is super important the only real way to handle that is in ears.   

[hammer]

I'd have to second what Keith has said. Unless your drummer wasn't playing onstage with the rest of the band and was out in the audience, what he was hearing was not necessarily what the audience was hearing. He may have a good ear but I've found more often than not that what we hear on stage doesn't come close to what is heard in the paying seats. In some rooms it's a subtle difference while in others it is extremely pronounced.

[moongerm]

Roll the filters off and use an Ampeg SVT 4 Pro with pro neo a 15" and a 2 or 4 x 10. That'll learn em ...

[jazzyvee]

I've been reading this thread to gather more thoughts about mids in my stage sound and found this eq smile which Mica states neck throughs exhibit.
http://club.alembic.com/index.php?topic=19706
I'm not sure I understand clearly.
Are we talking about the physical bass itself giving a slightly scooped mid range because of the construction and the pickups are just reproducing this before anything that the tone controls do?
I don't hear any scoop at all if I have the filters fully open which I presume is the natural sound of the strings only amplified rather than tone controlled. Only when I deliberately choose to do a scoop sound with the neck filter closed down and the bridge opened up fully or nearly so do I hear that.
Maybe my ears are not flat.... :-)
Is there something inherently wrong with having a good mid range presence and a full range sound as it seems to work well for me when I choose to use it. I'm completely open to advice here as I really want to get to understand where to apply and how tastefully. At the moment I'm doing what I feel works but never 100% sure. Thanks

[keith_h]

I don't know that I would go with a neck through scooping the mids. I think it is really more that the neck through has a more even response across the tonal spectrum. I think the scooping comes when you compare this to basses with a neck/body joints. If you are use to the mid-range bump on one of these a neck through will sound scooped. As most bass players come from and play Fender or Fender derivatives you have a large portion of the musician base that is use to the emphasized mids. I'm not going to get into the effect of different types of woods as this is present regardless of type of construction.

Mids are good and bad. Bass, keyboards and rhythm guitar all occupy overlapped portions of the mid range. It is easy for them to step on each others range which can muddy the tone. When you get into the bass guitar portion of the midrange the frequency also tend to be those that react with the environment more. As the waves start interact with stages and building surfaces all sorts of bad things can happen with the result again being muddy sound. The real kicker is bass guitar needs some mids to cut through (the good). So you need some to sound good in the mix but they only work well if the other players that share your space leave room in it for you. This is where the sound engineer earns their keep as they are the ones responsible for accomplishing this out front.   

I could be, and probably am, way off base here but the modern use of scooping has more to do with a musical style as opposed to mixing the band instruments. With Fender style instruments the mids tend to overpower the highs and lows. With the slapping technique relying on bright percussive highs juxtaposed against the deeper notes. To accomplish this you need to dial back the mids for the highs to be heard and the lows to have that in your gut impact. In other words scooping is used as an effect as opposed to a mixing technique.

[edwardofhuncote]

Enjoying this thread...just had a long (related) discussion the other day, with our guitar player, about what sonic space we each occupy, and how that either contributes to, or robs from the overall sound coming through the speakers. My setting is probably somewhat different from most here, in that other than my bass, we use acoustic instrumentation, and very elementary percussion if at all, so I'm never competing for volume. Most times I think, it's about me not covering up too much mid-range, leaving that for the rhythm guitar, but at the same time, being judicious about the extreme low end available with my fifth string.

For an experiment last weekend, I did a whole show with (our oldtyme band) using only my 4-string Distillate, and never missed having the extended range.

Well... that's not entirely true...  I missed it terribly, but our sound didn't suffer because it wasn't there. Plus, it was good brain exercise and discipline. 

[gtrguy]

This is subjective, but I think bass and the kick drum own the bottom end (unless you have a Hammond B3 in the mix!). The bass is somewhat more omni-directional but requires lots of energy (think headroom) to be out there. The mids give it clarity and musical style. I think growl lives in that range too. The treble highs I usually avoid.

Many country groups mix so that the bass just seems to have lows, w/o the mids and highs. Funk needs the lows and the mids. Rock can be just lows or lows & mids. Jazz seems to like some low and some mids with often a more acoustic sounding feel. Hip Hop can go for the ultra lows a lot, often with little else. Pop used to have a 'catchy' bass sound, but I think that is not so much the case? (I am older!). Now it's all about the vocal. Newer groups seem to re-writting the rules again, with sound quality in the mix that feels cheesy, but if it sells... I don't know if this is deliberate?

I hear groups now with successful tunes that a sound engineer from the old school would laugh at, in terms of a good mix and great playing. However, the vocals still have to sound good.

For me, I always set my bass amp on the floor, as i think that helps the tone. I use an amp that I can turn the horn speaker on or off, and I experiment with it. I used to use a cab that had a 15" EV guitar speaker in it, and it really had the 'growl'. However, it blew up! I am back to 1, 2, or 4 10" speakers in the cabs they come in.


I also record music, and often I have to dumb down a great sounding instrument in order to make the whole song sound good. I never compete with the vocals with anything else, never. Also, the conversion to, say, an MP3 format can change the whole thing. One thing I do is master my own songs, and I put that plug in on while mixing down, so I kinda know what the final product will sound like.

There are so many elements involved... We did a small outdoor gig 2 weeks ago where i had to put my bass amp on a deck on the drummers carpet pad and it sounded like crap. At an outdoor gig last week I set it on the the pavement at a street festival and it sounded great, as usual. I still don't know why it sounded bad on the deck.

Rambling on here, time for coffee!

[edwin]

David, I highly recommend an Auralex Gramma for the times you have to put your cabinet on a hollow surface like a deck. It decouples the cabinet and brings back the punch and clarity that otherwise gets lost vibrating the floor. I always use mine unless I'm on concrete.

[hankster]

J.,this "Mids"thing is , I think, subjective, and changeable. There's nothing like a meaty mid-heavy tone for certain funk or R&B grooves; and nothing like the disapproval of the same by some tone purists who want the "ass" and the"glass" but don't like what's in between. What do you want, and what do your band mates (not just the drummer) want - those are the salient questions. Alembic basses have so much capacity we sometimes worry that because we can respond to the criticism, we should - but I say, go with the sound you feel. You're the expert.

R.

[jazzyvee]

Good point you make there Hankster, I guess why I try to take on board some things like tone is because most of my musical career has been as a guitarist so I know how to get a good sound on that instrument wherever I am, generally speaking. On bass now I still feel new because
a) I haven't gigged much on bass compared to guitar so haven't built up a good experience of what I want to sound like on stage or how to achieve it.
b) This is the only bass rig i've done any real gigging with and so again haven't built up any experience of how different rigs sound.
c) Alembic is the only bass that I've gigged regularly and because they sound different I want to make that difference work with the songs I play.
d) All of the bassists I hear live generally go for the scooped sound which if I wanted I would have got a fender style bass so I want the alembic sound to be different all the time but work with the song.

[edwin]

My personal approach to mids is to bring them in enough so that the variations of tone achieved by my fingers are more or less apparent. If I go for a scooped tone, things tend to even out and/or get lost. It also depends heavily on what else is going on in the band. If everyone else is covering those mids, obviously it's time to get out of the way.

Also, as far as kick and bass go, yes they own the bottom end, but it's helpful to make sure they aren't competing for the same part of it. How that gets doled out depends on a lot of factors, from stylistic to acoustic, but having both blasting away at, say, 60 hz or 80hz, creates mud. Give the bottom octave to one and the next octave to the other.

[dtothec]

Jazzy you might be over thinking this. The drummers problem with mids might just be that he is not used to really hearing them. If he is used to cheap basses and equipment that sounds like a rumbly muddled mess, then the mids that your equipment will reproduce will sound extremely bright to him. I was at a jam session last weekend and the main band's bass sounded so bad that you could not distinguish one note from the other. There were two Alembics in the house and we both sounded clean and clear playing through the same system, you could hear every single note. It might be a simple case of what he's used to and nothing more!