Gee, clean with punch is right up my alley. For the stuff I play and the guys I play with, it's pretty much the rule. I love low end, but don't want to bury them in mud, and on a lot of our music you're really exposed and often the only thing happening down in that register. Just out of curiosity, have you tried raising your bridge pickup about as high as you can get it without hitting the strings, cranking its tone up and messing with the blend? I'm all for buying new gizmos for the sheer thrill of it, but when you start talking about bright, clean tone with flats (especially without cutting out all the low end) that sort of pickup/tone setup has always been the ticket for me without having to add any boxes. I'll also admit that for the most part, I'm not very into compression on my basses because I don't really want anything evening out the volume and/or attack that I happen to be putting into it. The combination of a fairly deep, bassy setting on the neck pickup and a very bright setting on the bridge has usually yielded a punch that often resembles one if those instances where you pluck a string and the drummer stomps the bass drum at the exact same instant. I have my old Frankenstein Gibson set up that way in stereo, but it isn't bad run mono and my RIC 2030, Pedulla Buzz, Hofner and Hagstrom eight-string are all set up similarly, but are mono. I may at times lack talent, class, money, tackt, spelling ability and a lot of other stuff, but punch with flats I have plenty of, and with nothing more than tone controls and a tall bridge pickup. Here is a string of short sample clips if you're bored:
http://webpages.charter.net/tbradshaw/M ... amples.mp3
- The first two are the fretless Gibson with old Guild tape-wound flats, through my Acoustic 150 head and a Sunn 118VH folded horn that was miced for the recording.
- Number three is the Pedulla Buzz fretless and at the time, it had Fender tape-wound flats on it, run through my Traynor YBA 200 head and into the board.
- Number four is the Hofner V63 Beatle with TI jazz flats, also through the Traynor head and straight in.
- Five and six are the Hag-eight with Jazz Flats for all eight strings (one of the nice things about short-scale eights is that the octaves can be regular guitar strings). Through the Traynor and into the board. Number five is my best (though admittedly, pretty lame) impersonation of TP. I sent it to one of the guys as a joke to show him that the folk song he had just written had rock and roll potential, but that he just couldn't see it. Number six shows what I mean by "exposed". Anything that's not squeeky clean in one of these transparent, minimal mixes stands out like a sore thumb.
I usually keep rounds on the 2030, which have no problem with punch, so I didn't include it in this batch, but anybody who believes that you can't get bright clean tone and a good amount of punch out of flats, even tape-wound flats, is misinformed. There is nothing wrong with buying and using a compressor, but you might also want to play around a bit with the pickups and knobs and see what it produces.
but I think mine is right - he says the bass should be punchier. I usually play with my thumb or pick, and now prefer playing with TI Jazz Flats. They type of music we play doesn't require the typical Squire/Lee growl, but I do like a relatively bright, clean tone with the flats (yes, you can get that), so to add punch, I need compression - right?
