Hi there guys this is Ben Jones from The Intitute as part of the Bass Expo for Music Radar.
We're going to be looking now at some amplifiers and how to get a decent sound without an amplifier.
A lot of guys probably rock up to a rehearsal studio with their basses, come in, turn everything
on full as they can and wonder why it's either deafening or they can't hear anything really
apart from noise. So let's just quickly go in and look at the first thing which
is putting it in the right place. So, we've got here, input, you can just see there input,
that's where the guitar lead needs to go, so one end in your guitar like so and one
end into the input, once that's in all the way we're ready to rock. So let's look at
the amplifier here, now there's lots of dials here, we're only concerned with a certain
few, we're going to talk about those in just a second. The 1st one we're going to look
at is the gain here, now gain is how much signal that is being sent to the amplifier.
Obviously when you play the bass, the sound is picked up here, sent through the cable
into the aplifier, what we're doing is basically telling the amplifier how much signal we're
going to give it. We move on we've got mids, bass and treble. These 3 are the main important
ones for actually sculpting your sound, these are the ones we're going to be looking at
in just a second. However this guy here, the master, this is one of the most important
ones as well because what the master does is it can tell you how much signal is going to
come out so the gain tells you how much is going in but the master tells you how much
is going out, ie that's your volume. So when you're on your ipods at home, you turn up
your volume you want to hear more sound. Master is essentially what that is for an amplifier.
So now if I turn up my volume up on my bass, turn the gain down ever so slightly, we'll
now get sound. However if i turn the gain up a touch but turn the master down, nothing,
it's gone, we have to have the master up to get some sound. So what I'm going to do is
I'm going to set all of these to 12. So half, half off basically, so we can start to hear
the difference between them. So that's my mid, my bass and my treble all set to 12.
Now when I play my bass, that sounds more like a bass should do. Now let's talk about
what happens to these frequencies when we change them. Let's deal with the 1st one which
is bass, now bass as freuqnecy it gives what we called depth to a sound, other words you
hear this fatness, warmth, that's the sort of thing that describes bass. So if you want
to play something that has to have a very heavy bottom end, that's what we called the
bass is the bottom so if you want to feel the bass rumbling underneath you, you're going
to need a little bit more of that bass. Mid is also known as the punch of a sound, so
it's sits between obiously the bass and the treble and it gives clarity to notes, if you
have a lot of bass and not a lot of mid, you'll hear things but you won't hear them very clearly.
The last one to look at is treble, now as bass players, treble is something that's not
super important to us because obviously we're bass players, we want the bass sound more
than anything, however what the treble does give you is what we call the crispness to
the sound, it just gives that little bit of sparkle on the top which actually coupled
with the mids cuts through a mix nicely, now we're not always going to play low, fat notes
down here. Sometimes, we want to play up the top end and get some of that melody sound
that maybe guitarists are more used to, so really what you want to do is when you go
into your rehearsal studio, you want to come in, put it on 12, because all basses will be different
that's is one thing we must understand, each bass will sound different through a different
amp, so to compensate for that, put them all on 12 first, so you're basically half on half
off and then just tweak very carefully what you hear, you hear too much bass, pull the
bass back, if you can't hear your notes enough, bring the mids up and maybe bring the treble
down a bit. Now each genre is actually going to look at different EQs on the amp and that's
the next thing we're going to look at. So we'll see you soon