I'm with Joey, especially because I sacrificed my spine to Ampeg SVTs and Sunn Coliseums (I hate pickups - the vehicles - but had to drive one for decades just to haul bass amps around).
You never see folded-horn enclosures any more. Gosh, I wonder why? I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that those low notes break about fifty feet away, so that you could barely hear anything when you were standing in front of it and thirty feet away people looked like they were bouncing around in an air-castle.
Over the decades it gradually sunk in through my rather handsome yet remarkably thick skull that sound works kinda like a cone; low frequencies denote power and higher frequencies provide definition.
A recording engineer who had done tons of mobile recordings for everything from Charlie Parker to orchestras and big bands told me that the problem is that all the instruments hog the spectrum from 250 MHz to around 1K.
Basically, that's the root of the problem you're describing. Without the upper harmonics and partials to provide definition, even an Alembic sounds like a floor tom, with more sustain. (Boy, wouldn't we love to hear Ron Wickersham or Sonicus' take on that? And a translator to tell us what they said?)
To return to the cone analogy: the higher the frequency, the more directional. That's why 5.1 home theater systems stick the woofer behind the sofa. The best example is the
Bose 812 flexible array system.
Note the 1,000 watt subwoofer stays in the same place, alone, forgotten, with no direction. Hell, it's only one 12 speaker!
As Joey said in his brilliantly-written, concise treatise on the topic;
quote:All you can really do: ... stay away from big EQ pushes. You want enough low end to anchor the band, a little low mids, and enough top end to get articulation. I agree with Mica that too much mids is just not helpful, and tends to stack up with the guitars or bright keyboards.
I like that he also noted the influence of your stage amp on your overall sound, but for a different reason: as bassists, we're in the worst place in the room to hear ourselves. We compound that by tweaking our rigs to get the perfect sound, then show up at the gig and it sounds like somebody playing a tuba over the radio. So we blame the soundman (I noticed that happens every time this topic comes up, even though the soundman is the only person there with a vested interest in making you sound your best).
Maybe it's because I'm primarily an upright bassist (even when I'm horizontal) from an orchestral background, and nobody goes to a symphony expecting the 3rd chair bassist to suddenly break out in a wild improvised solo, but I think you have to know the factors - without using adjectives - and minimize the discrepancies.
What I mean by that is trust the soundman and use the language of sound. I learned that the hard way when my Bassman amp decided to self-immolate midway through the second set at a gig with Roomful of Blues, in front of around 4,000 people. Luckily the soundman (an English bloke ) had a SansAmp bass DI thingie and in a couple of minutes we were back up, and I couldn't believe how much better the bass sounded! From that moment on, I rethought - and reconfigured - everything. I paid really close attention to both the settings on the FOH and monitor boards, and instead of gazing off into the distance, growling nonsense like; more beefy, with a little 'shimmer' on the high end I noted exactly what the settings were on the board(s) and started thinking of my stage amp more as a monitor rather than the source of all that is holy and good (like I said: SVTs and Coliseums will give that false impression, if you don't get bitch-slapped back to reality before your backbone gives out).
I think of soundmen as being like salesmen: everybody only remembers the bad ones. The good ones want to help you, but they can only do that if you convey what you want, and it's in service to the sound of the ensemble.
The truly great ones surpass your expectations because they're so good at what they do they don't care what you want. Treasure them. Learn from them. Bring them offerings.
As for every time this topic comes up (a couple of times a week, by my figgerin'), somebody decries soundmen as the enemy and they always seem to make the same accusation: they try to make our Alembics sound like Fender Precisions. As though that's a bad thing. Notable Alembic players John McVie, John Entwistle and John Paul Jones (the three Johns?) all used Precisions. (Live At Leeds featured Entwistle on a Precision, a fact I didn't know until very recently). James Jamerson of Motown/Tamla and
Carol Kaye used Precisions, on literally hundreds of the most popular songs in history. I'd kill to have my '62 Precision back, and for the cretin who stole it to have his haunches infested with abscesses.
In fact, one of my favorite settings on my Series 1 sounds a lot like a Precision. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.
But I defy anyone to make a Precision sound like an Alembic.
