best thing for tone improvement ?

[kreig]

Wyliee ,

It's WOOOD - L - ee , WOOOD - L - ee .

You are standing wAAAAAy too close to your rig . You should be standing much closer to the axe-mans rig !
sheesh :icon_scratch: ... I thought all bassists knew that !?  :dontknow:

 

[stubhead]

I always try to stand closest to the cymbals, cause drummers play such subtle & fascinating things....

"Best thing for tone improvement ?"

Practice

- No shirt, Shitlocke.... my all-time favorite music quote:

"First, it's important to have a concept of good tone - no matter what it is. And then the rest is just finding it."

- Jerry Garcia. A major part of why great musicians sound great is not "in their fingers", but IN THEIR HEADS - they're trying to sound great, and they've thought about how to do so and dicked with it - a lot.

Before even engaging on the cycle of buying and selling umpteen piles of stuff, searching for "the" tone, THOUSANDS of dollars/pounds/yuan/shekels, it's a great idea to learn what tone is - a $40 Ebay graphic equalizer is a starting point, as is a chart of what frequencies are generated by each string/first-order harmonic/second order etc.... think about what happens when a signal that is high in treble is overdriving a tube, vs. what happens when the bass frequencies are the trigger...
http://www.amptone.com/

I know people with shoeboxes full of pickups, who have been through  a dozen high-end Bogners and Soldanos and old Boogie amps, and they still don't know what a 1000 Hz signal SOUNDS like. They'll never get there.... :sad1: (I get to dick with a lot of great amps tho.... :toothy12 All this crazy stuff you read about chime/sparkle/crunch/creamy/liquid/ballsy etc. is just marketing terminology that has become "wisdom for idiots" - it all means frequencies, with stages & types of distortion & processing. Guitar cords are an equalizer, speakers are an equalizer, the type of speaker cabinet is an equalizer....

 

[TonyFlyingSquirrel]

Hey, Wyliee. I think I stumbled across a vid of you playing on youtube. If it was you playing the LPS then I thought you were really good. Seriously polished playing. If it wasnt you then I am sure you are good anyway!

Also, Jack.............. are you Snouter on youtube? You seem to look a little like him.

Wouldn't have been me.  I hold the foundation down for the rest of you guys to go whiddley-whiddley......

Don't forget "Tappity-Tappity,Sweepity-Sweepity"

 

[dbw]

I'm more from the chuggachuggachug-chuggachuggachug-chuggachuggachug-chuggachugchiggy-growwwwllllll-grrr-grrrowwwwwl school of guitarists.

Oh, and here's a simple way to improve tone... VOLUME.  arty07:

 

[stubhead]

Oh, and here's a simple way to improve tone... VOLUME.

I actually agree with this, to a large extent - trying to make a little amp "sound louder than it is" is an exercise in futility. Great tone is mostly subtractive - take away what you don't want, and you'll be left with what's good. Hendrix used a cheap coily cord to drop the initial resonant peak of his Stratocaster from around 2000Hz to about 800Hz; the "good" Tube Screamers do much the same thing with a couple of op-amp chips that effectively kill treble - just a historical accident, but it worked. :toothy12: All guitar speakers cabinets without tweeters roll off a huge percentage of the higher frequencies, above 4K and up depending on the speaker.

Try plugging a Strat straight into a 1000 watt power amp or keyboard amp, right into some PA speakers with horns or tweeters - you can shatter teeth with that rig. As obnoxious as some punk & metal bands have been, I don't know of any of them who have fully exploited the treble range so as to actually kill their audience... arty07:

(If I'm playing with a drummer or outside my main power rig is a SWR stereo bass head - 250 watts per side into some Black Widow speakers rated to 700 watts each. I once knocked a sheet of drywall right off the studs - and it was on "3"... :evil4

 

[dbw]

I'm not joking, volume might be the best thing for tone.  It's not just because power amp distortion is so yummy... there have been studies (I'm sure you can find them online) that show people like music better if it's played louder.

 

[GoDrex]

horrible tones played louder is not a good thing