Getting good bass tones

[WORMDIRT]

My bass rig sounds like shit. I suck at bass tone "theory" I guess.
The rig is a PV mk3 bass (250ish watts?) into a sunn 2x15 with eminence gammas, and a random crate solid state head (250 watts) into a 2x15 loaded with hartke aluminum cone 15s.
Bass is a squire p-bass with stock pickups.
No pedals (yet)
If I crank it, the sound turns to shit. Not distorted but more like the muddy flubby crap, with a serious lack of bass frequencies
Whats the deal? Do I need more porting on the cabs or something?
I just want to play loud.

[crochambeau]

What sort of EQ do you have dialed at the heads? Sometimes it's more effective to *subtract* frequencies you don't want and make up for it with more power than it is to try and add what you (think you) want and force that mess through the power stages.

[daseb]

Do you use a pick or your fingers? What do you tune to?

Trouble is with those heads, the more you turn them up the more bass frequencies you lose. Not that they're actually bad amps, far from it, just you know, at huge volume they're not going to deliver thundering low end. Even pushing it with pedals you're going to be working against the upper limits of the amps. Which kinda sucks because they're both solid, reliable heads.

Some sort of low end eq booster type pedals will help. A bass compressor will definitely help especially if you think things are getting flubby. Spending $80 on a good replacement pickup for the bass will definitely help. Maybe looking into speaker efficiency is also something you might wanna check out? That's an arcane science I myself don't particularly understand.

With bass, we're often playing right down at the lower edges of human hearing. The more air you're moving the better chance of getting those low frequencies to jump out when you're standing in front of your amp. While it's not like two SVTs driving a couple of 4x15s, that rig still actually sounds pretty killer really so I think it's a matter of looking into what you can do to work with what you got. Crochambeau's post about subtracting frequencies is a really good point, especially if you're working against the power handling of the heads. You might even be having phase issues with running them both at once that are cutting your bottom end?

I used to play in a very loud very doomy band where I ended up having to use two amps to really get there with this. I mean, my idea of a reasonable amount of bottom end is like, sunn playing through a dub soundsystem on mushrooms so I'm biased, but eventually it was like, one tube head running completely clean with the bass dimed and everything else cut, and one solid state head running dirty to get the actual notes out. Even then towards the end I was doing stupid stuff like running a clean line to the PA through a MS20 filter.

Seeing as you've got two amps, it might be worth experimenting with that: cutting out all the top end in one amp and seeing if it can add a nice thick, dubby low to what you're doing without worrying so much about the actual notes. If you're going to end up using drive effects I REALLY recommend doing this.


So, to summarize this long winded post:

technique
new pickup (?)
compression on one or both amps
speakers (?)
set up your amps with opposing eq's.

[SoaringTortoise]

A serious lack of bass frequencies when you crank it sounds like a phase problem between your two cabinets. It could be that your speaker cabs are out of phase with one another. One cabs speakers are moving forward when the other cabs speakers are moving backward thus causing frequency cancellation most noticeable in the bass. If this is the problem you have to rewire one of the speaker cabs.

If that's not the problem my next thought might be to "subtract" the "random crate solid state head" from the equation.

[D.o.S.]

What sort of EQ do you have dialed at the heads? Sometimes it's more effective to *subtract* frequencies you don't want and make up for it with more power than it is to try and add what you (think you) want and force that mess through the power stages.

1,000 this -- while it's counterintuitive, you might want to turn the bass down on your preamp.

[WORMDIRT]

Thanks guys.
First off, I play with a pick, in standard
I'll check into the phase thing, but something I forgot to disclose is that I run the preamp out from the PV to the front end of the crate. I dunno if that would effect the phase.
I can do the 9v test and make sure the cabs are both in phase. (I think that is how you test it.. 9v to the leads, see which way the speakers push yadda yadda)
Also, subtracting the crate from the equation isn't really possible because the whole point is being loud as fuck haha.
I basically run the PV clean and the crate breaks up from the front end getting slammed by PV preamp out. The crate is all highs, basically a ghetto biamp job.
Compression would be cool, but I don't have them $$ for anything right now.
I'll do some more "scientific" tests tomorrow as far as EQ goes, I kinda just aimlessly twiddled knobs, getting increasingly pissed today.

[daseb]

any reason you're not running them as separate amps into different cabs?

[D.o.S.]

Yeah, dial the first couple of sliders on the MKIII way down and see if that helps.

[WORMDIRT]

any reason you're not running them as separate amps into different cabs?

The answer to that is sad and simple. I can't daisy chain them from the inputs, and I don't want to run a stereo pedal to run them both separately

[D.o.S.]

You're running it into the 'preamp in' or something ,right?

[Mudfuzz]

any reason you're not running them as separate amps into different cabs?

The answer to that is sad and simple. I can't daisy chain them from the inputs, and I don't want to run a stereo pedal to run them both separately

[WORMDIRT]

You're running it into the 'preamp in' or something ,right?

Somewhat. Its bass-PV / 2x15 #1- PV preamp out - crate / 2x15 #2

[Mudfuzz]

ok, that should in theory be fine, in a perfect world… sadly the world is not a perfect place at all.

Question: using the Peavy alone can you you get a big beaffy sound?

[rfurtkamp]

Yea, preamp out into another amp when you're not happy is recipe for disaster.

One additional thing that hasn't been mentioned: are you playing too loud for the room?

That's one way for stuff to start sounding like you're describing.

Start lower volume, one amp. Get a good sound. Take a shot of the amp's settings when you're happy. Save that. Use that as your future baseline. Crank up volume, repeat.

You're getting complex far faster than necessary without being happy - throwing more stuff at the problem rarely solves it.

A final aside: can you get a sound you're happy with in headphones? At low volumes?

Are you compensating for something technique-wise with volume?

These aren't necessarily the kindest questions but observations of watching bass players with issues for a couple decades.

[D.o.S.]

You're running it into the 'preamp in' or something ,right?

Somewhat. Its bass-PV / 2x15 #1- PV preamp out - crate / 2x15 #2

Right what I'm asking is whether or not the crate has some kind of slave in -- I know the Peavey has a master out.