The case of the disappearing bottom end

Bob-Dubery · 2009-03-04T13:02:21+00:00

Hi all. Another thing that happened last week whilst I had to deal with a drunk heckler (see elsewhere in the forum). Usually my guitar, when plugged in, has a pretty good bottom end. This has been the case even when using my lone stomp box (a Carl Martin chorus). Now I have checked since the gig and all the batteries involved have juice in them, and everything seems to be working just fine when playing through my PC's sound card and into it's external speakers. But on the night... playing with the chorus pedal off was fine. Everything sounded good. The pedal is built so that the bypass is a true, absolute bypass. The moment I engaged the pedal I lost volume. OK... the pedal has a gain control so that you can have a volume boost when you enage the chorus effect. I was able to compensate for the volume loss by turning up the boost. However irrespective of the boost setting there was a very noticable loss of bottom end with the pedal turned on. Hasn't happened before. Hasn't happened again. Very odd. The guitar was plugged into the stomp box. The output from the stomp box went into a combo mixer/amp via a regular mono lead with a jack plug at the guitar end of things. The pickup in the guitar is a Baggs and it has a pre-amp built into the end-pin. With the chorus off it sounded great, with the chorus on there was a loss of volume which could be compensated for and a loss of bottom end which could not be compensated for. I have previously played at the same venue, with the same PA and the same sound guy, using the same guitar and pedal and (between guitar and pedal) lead. Anybody got an idea what happened here and how I can guard against it in the future?

Heath

alchol should also be banned at practises , to many bands have gone to hell because of sdrink

Neps

Well.. I'm not too draconian.. But Dairy and certain juices are a no no.. Coffee is also not a great friend but one needs your coffee.. Tea is always recomended, liters of water.. Fizzy drinks I'm not a fan of.. Sugar and CO2 isn't a good combination, except for gas..

But it's also down to certain vocalists.. I had one vocalist who I forced to take a smoke before a take.. It just enhanced his voice.. Don't worry, he is a smoker, and actualy loved to be able to smoke in the live room..

What I do have in ample supply is water, tea, redbull, creamsoda (dont ask..) and lemon juice..

Neps

Tail0n wrote alchol should also be banned at practises , to many bands have gone to hell because of sdrink

I've banned beer from gigs, sessions and rehearsals!! A nice whiskey whilst rehearsing is allowed.. But only 2 doubles at most.. And it needs to be Johnny Black at least.. One of the guys got Johnny Blue as a present from a client once, but we felt too bad to open it, so we just went with the remaining Green Label that we got as payment for a gig once.. That bottle of Blue is still standing there untouched after 6 months..

AlanRatcliffe

I tend to think the problem was the guy on the board. DIfferent guy than usual?

Usually when mixing acoustic guitars in a band or ensemble mix, the first thing that the engineer will do is engage the low cut to tame the low end, leaving space for the other instruments. When you do solo guitar or guitar and voice, you leave the lows in to keep a full sound from the one instrument, but if your engineer doesn't have the experience with solo guitar, he goes with what he knows - leaving you with a bass shy mix.

Phasing issues are more likely to give you notches in your high frequency that you'll hear as nasally tones - to kill the low end you need a signal that's a fixed 180 degrees out of phase and mixed in with the direct signal at a high level (unlikely to happen unless you have more than one signal coming from the guitar).

Bob-Dubery

Alan Ratcliffe wrote I tend to think the problem was the guy on the board. DIfferent guy than usual?

There's a pair of them, and they've "done" me before. They've never had problems with my guitar sound before.

And as I said, the bottom end was only lost when I engaged the chorus pedal. If I kicked the effect in the bottom end disappeared. If I turned it off the bottom end was instantly back.

This is the 2nd time I played with this pedal and with those guys and that sound system. First time went fine - second time we ran into this problem.

AlanRatcliffe

Sorry Bob (note to self: do not scan read when you are in a rush! LOL!)

Hmm. Could only be the pedal, but I have no idea as to what could be causing it.

Bob-Dubery

Alan Ratcliffe wrote Sorry Bob (note to self: do not scan read when you are in a rush! LOL!)

Hmm. Could only be the pedal, but I have no idea as to what could be causing it.

Which leaves us with the battery... oh well, if that's the price of a good sounding gig.

Bob-Dubery

A late return to this topic.

Friends of mine played at TJs recently. They are experienced players in the first place, in the second place they just plugged their guitars in - no pedals, no outboard pre-amps, just took the leads that TJs told them to use and plugged in.

There was some distinct wierdness going on with the sound. This wasn't helped by two people trying to adjust the sound at the same time. It got so wierd that at least two people asked my friend Richard "what was that weird stomp box you were using?" He wasn't using anything at all.

From where I sat it seemed that they were trying to apply some kind of delay effect at the desk, and that this started to run away from them, maybe going into self-oscillation mode. Clearly they can apply this on a channel by channel basis because it never got onto the vocals.

So could it be that if they started using this kind of effect on the desk and somebody else had a modulation or delay type pedal that some kind of interference or cancellation could occur?

« Previous Page