The Steel Guitar Forum

If I want a more mellow tone on my fender bassman would I turn the treble down or the mids or both? Also, how much of each? Also, what do you suggest with the bass? I like a real mellow tone. No ice picky shrill sounds

I'm sure others will chime in, but you might try to simply adjust your picking technique and move further away from the pickup/changer. Experiment with picking your lines around the 15th-20th fret instead of directly above the pickup, and you might be surprised at the result.

The advantage of this is that you can leave your amp set to a hotter, more old-school steel tone with some bite when you pick normally by the changer, but you can easily alter it with just your technique instead of messing with the amp too much.

YMMV, but happy pickin'! To answer your question directly, Fender amps are naturally mid-cut, but if I were you I'd kill all/most of the mids and set the bass/treble to taste.

Thanks for the tips. I appreciate it a lot

You should read this: http://pickroar.com/1003/the-tone-stack ... or-humans/. The mid control in a conventional tone stack does a more than you might think.

Start with the bass at 6-8, and the mids all the way down. Then, adjust the tone with the treble control (usually below 4). If the bass is too "thumpy" raise the mids a little.

When I discussed this with Lenny, he suggested I get a BOSS GE7, it's an inline EQ.

Hmmm.....here's a quote from the article Ian pointed out:

"if you aggressively scoop your mids you are confused by tone and trying to avoid as much of it as possible, a grounded mid pot not just reducing mids but eliminating much of the rest of the amp’s sound.

But more importantly this explains why the mid control not only attenuates the mid frequencies, “it also attenuates the overall level of the output signal.”*"

The tone you perceive is very environment specific. When you are sitting right in front of, or next to your amp, you hear a lot more high end than you woud hear, say, 50 feet away. High frequencies drop off much faster than lows. This is especially true if there are a bunch of noisy people in the room. What sounds "mellow" in your practice space can sound thick and mushy farther away in a large room.

Try picking farther up on the neck. Also, a lot of the piercing highs you'll hear is from the speaker "beaming". A weber beam blocker will instantly tame those highs and disperse them evenly. You can get an idea by placing a coffee (or CD or foam or duct tape) can lid on the grill of your amp directly over the cone. I keep a portable one handy, but those Weber Beam Blockers are great. The tone is subjective and will vary from room to room. Not enough highs and you'll get buried.

Drew
An acoustic guitar maker once told me that the true sound of an instrument is not in your lap while you play, but well out and away from the player. That little piece of advice has never let me down. When I play through an amplifier, it is may own "rule" that I get as far away as my cord lets me in order to get the tone I want the audience to hear. Thanks for the reminder.
Norm

For a really good explanation of tone stacks, watch these two videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BatwDYF ... Y0&index=5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZHM5Bw ... Y0&index=9

then download the Duncan Amps tone stack calculator. This will give you a graphic picture of your tone stack response. You can vary any or all of the controls and see the changes in freq response and gain (or more accurately, loss).

http://www.duncanamps.com/tsc/

This is a really powerful tool and pulls it all together. You can select the Fender tone stack and/or change any of the values to see what it does to the response curves.

I got a lot of use out of this when I was optimizing the tone stack of a vintage Traynor Bass Master for steel guitar. Saves a ton of trial and error.

Tame the "shrill" before it ever gets to the amp...


B

Yea that's why I ordered my freeloader. Looking forward to having a little control over that top end