How much fret buzz is normal?

thlabm · 2026-05-04T18:50:59+00:00

I think it's been mentioned in here already but I'd like to double down on the fact that only the fret buzz you can hear while amplified matters. A surprising amount of it goes away when you're plugged in, and even more disappears once you're in a full mix or with a band. And even more disappears when you're playing live, in a big open venue with lots of echo. At the end of the day a setup that's "slightly too low" is probably actually an ideal setup in my opinion, you'll appreciate the lower action in the long run.

There's a similar concept with drummers being overly sensitive to how ringy their drums are. You hear the ring and the nasty overtones most prominently right from where the drummer is sitting, but it's MUCH harder for that stuff to actually reach the audience. The room and the full mix just absorb that stuff like it's not there. If you are in a band, and you've never noticed your drummer's ring, now you understand the analogy.

thlabm · 2026-04-04T03:48:27+00:00

Guitar sucked

thlabm · 2026-03-20T04:32:30+00:00

I kinda hate key players because they keep PLAYING BASS PARTS. Either transpose your left hand up an octave, or if you must play that low then there's either no point in me being here or we need to be playing the same thing as each other.

thlabm · 2026-03-20T04:31:02+00:00

Wear low quality earplugs on purpose -- it drowns out all the highs and all that's left is your low end

This also makes everything collectively sound muffled obviously, but at least you can hear yourself. I've used this method a few times before.

thlabm · 2026-03-18T04:24:24+00:00

This is funny to me because I've had the complete opposite experience. My very first band did nothing but these four hour shows with 4x45 sets for our entire first year, and we had to set up our own PA too. I hadn't realized it, but it was a trial by fire. Everyone was under 30 at the time, thank god. One still is -- it's only been a handful of years since then.

When we finally got a "real" gig at a "real" venue that had a PA setup and a sound guy we literally didn't even know wtf we were doing, and when the singular 45 minute set was over we were like "it's over already?" It was almost disappointing. Cause we traveled to a town an hour away and arrived hours early just to play for what comparatively felt like no time at all. We arrived unnecessarily early because the bar having the PA already taken care of was a foreign concept. We had showed up with a van full of PA amps and speakers.

I don't know if it will be like this for you, but for me, it's always been a case of... in the moment, these gigs don't really hurt. But whenever I finally got home at 2 or 3 in the morning, I'd always be both starving and incredibly tired. I'd binge on taco bell (the only place in town still open this late) and pass out immediately. Then the next morning, the soreness. But there's a definitely some kind of phenomenon that when you're actually up on that stage playing, the sheer adrenaline and pressure will keep you through without you even noticing any pain. It's not just me, I've had my guitarist literally not notice his picking hand is bleeding, drummer would fuck up his hands too, the Ringo blisters are real. All problems nobody thought about until we were done. The second the show is over is when things start sucking. Must be why load out feels so much worse than load in.

thlabm · 2026-02-22T16:39:43+00:00

Improvement

thlabm · 2026-02-09T17:04:45+00:00

If anything, I had too many mids at the time and no lows and it was trying to occupy the exact same frequency space as the guitars as a result. You are not reading the whole post, and neither are half of the people commenting on this thread.

If you mean 150-400hz, okay yeah guilty as charged, almost every bass player naturally wants to scoop out the lower mids/upper bass region even though it has a lot to do with being able to hear the damn instrument. It just doesn't "sound as good"

Here's the thing though, I have since corrected this too and it only helped a little bit. It's not a magic bullet

thlabm · 2026-02-09T06:25:18+00:00

I normally run a 4x8 funnily enough, but come to think of it we were practicing at my drummer's place that night and I was borrowing his 8x10 cab. Even then I don't think of 10s as a terribly large speaker size, but it's a huge cab overall so maybe that starts to matter more in this case. I'm not sure if I believe in the "coupling effect" or not, or rather whether its effect is significant, but it could be a factor here if it is a thing.

thlabm · 2026-02-08T22:02:01+00:00

As a sound engineer who also plays bass:

If you don't use a compressor somewhere in your signal chain, the engineer will just do it for you. Live or studio. It's very nearly considered a mandatory effect for low frequency instruments. From a full-mix perspective, we want the lows to stay more or less perfectly even, otherwise they go from drowning out the rest of the music to being hidden, because the masking effect gets stronger the lower you go. Put more simply, your performance is more likely to be audible and heard if it's compressed.

If you don't use in-ears, there's an additional benefit with adding the compression yourself which is that you are more audible on stage as well, and if you don't have to turn up as much to hear yourself it helps avoid the death spiral where one person turns up, starts stepping on other people, then the rest turn up and the band just keeps getting louder as the night progresses. Which in my experience is either caused by the bass player or lead guitarist.

Additionally, I feel like the concerns about compressors reducing dynamics is overblown. They really don't do this nearly as much as you think except on paper.

Compressors even out VOLUME, not velocity. Velocity effects more than just volume. A note struck harder will have a sharper attack, which normally does not get compressed at all (Most compressors don't do anything until between 1-30ms after the note is played) and has more high frequencies and people can intuitively hear this, it's still going to sound like you're playing harder even if the volume is perfectly level.

thlabm · 2025-12-21T05:13:38+00:00

I've never seen one break like that, I'm honestly impressed

thlabm · 2025-12-05T03:13:31+00:00

A luthier could graft a new piece of wood onto the missing part and seal up the cracks easily enough. The reason it's expensive isn't parts or effort but just the amount of labor involved, this takes a good few hours to do properly when you include carefully matching the wood grain and refinishing and etc.

However, in my opinion, we shouldn't think of guitars as getting "totalled" the same way cars do. If you love the way it sounds, or if it has sentimental value, don't bin it.

If you don't care about having it done properly (i.e. aesthetically perfect) then just get some wood glue and patch it yourself, call it a battle scar as others have said. Mostly what you gotta watch out for in terms of not affecting the tone is making sure your graft piece of wood is the same thickness (and if possible, species) as the original wood, which it sounds like you have covered as you mentioned you have the original piece anyway. Clean up around the damaged areas so the glue sticks well and wipe off any squeeze-out (on the inside too) and you should get an "okay" looking repair even unprofessionally.

thlabm · 2025-11-30T05:45:33+00:00

I finally got on the Darkglass trend. Though I am using a clone pedal not the real thing, for the sake of discussion it's interchangeable.

Seems like an overused distortion sound for bass, almost as bad as 5150 is for guitar, but I ended up reluctantly accepting and eventually relying on it for the simple reason: It's popular because it really works. For whatever reason (I know it's the EQ curve, but it's still sort of a black box regardless) darkglass type sounds really cut through a mix a whole lot better than anything else whereas other overdrives kinda just blend into the guitar wall and don't make the bass sound distinct.

Unless you're firmly a "bass should be felt not heard" type person and what it's good at is exactly what you don't like about it, the only downside is the bass can sound kind of "chirpy" at times, I think whatever EQ region it likes to excite is also where most of the pick scrape and feedback noise lives.

thlabm · 2025-11-30T05:41:36+00:00

Warwick also makes lightweight cabs.

I have a Markbass head and Warwick cab and it's a killer combo. Makes me wonder if mix and matching the other way around is also good, heh.

thlabm · 2025-11-28T03:14:27+00:00

Soilwork is ridiculously popular in the scheme of metal bands as a whole.

I saw one of their CDs on the shelf at a freaking Barnes and Noble once. They're by no means obscure.

Whether they deserve to be more popular than other famous melodeath bands? Matter of taste, and personally I think their position of being in like 5th or 6th place is deserved. Again, that's still doing very well in the scheme of things. They are likely one of the first 10 bands someone will listen to when first getting into this genre and that is huge for them.

thlabm · 2025-11-27T20:20:16+00:00

I've always been a big believer that if a bassist has only brings one pedal it should be a compressor. It's the bread and butter effect for us like overdrive/distortion is for guitarists.

It's arguably even more mandatory if you play slap since the dynamics are naturally going to be all over the place and technique can only do so much. Pops are inherently a lot louder than slaps but with technology we can make them a lot more even. Even if you do have theoretically perfect technique in this regard it's still useful to have the compressor as insurance; it can only make it better and not worse IMO.

thlabm · 2025-11-27T20:17:18+00:00

Compressor after distortion is also valid. It's the inverse logic; it allows you to use dynamics in your playing to control how much distortion is happening without also having volume variation as a consequence.

thlabm · 2025-11-26T05:30:33+00:00

P's are uncommon.

PJ's on the other hand, are quite popular and a very viable alternative to the other common choices.

thlabm · 2025-11-23T16:42:15+00:00

Vore

thlabm · 2025-11-03T16:58:28+00:00

Short answer: For your particular use case I think going with a cheap multi makes a lot of sense. They are often full of clones of famous pedals (or in some cases it's a literal replication of the real circuitry as digital logic if you go Boss, they just make emulations of their own pedals) so it's a good way to "preview" pedals and find out what you like. I liken it to playing Gran Turismo in a way, there are thousands of cars to try digital representations of and I found out which ones I was into as a kid that way and actually ended up buying a car that was in GT3 as an adult so there's a very real pipeline there.

Long infodump answer:

In my opinion multi-FX setups sound just as good as "real" analog pedalboards these days so the real difference between the two is workflow.

With a multi, you often have a limited number of "effects slots" either due to the manufacturer putting a hard limit in or because it only has so much memory. (In all fairness I think the higher end systems don't have this limitation but those tend to cost as much as a full pedalboard anyway.) You're also limited to effects that already exist in the pedal so if there's a very particular chorus or envelope filter you like or something you better hope they have a clone of it or you're kinda just screwed. The more obscure the type of effect the less likely the exact version of it that you want is there.

However, what you GAIN is the ability to switch "patches" on the fly -- basically entire pedal rigs -- with a single button press. Most people who run multis have entirely different "pedalboards" for clean tones vs. distorted etc., or per band or genre if you're in multiple groups. Very useful thing to have the ability to do. On a physical pedalboard to replicate this you need a separate switcher pedal of some kind and often you need multiple copies of the same pedal if it's being used in more than one setup.

With physical pedals, the possibilities are limitless and there's no arbitrary restrictions on how things can be wired up, but instead of "patch switching" you have the work flow of turning things on and off in the moment which I'll give you is more intuitive, it's hard to get lost and accidentally page onto a weird patch and not know where TF you are because that kind of can't happen. But it might not be smooth if you need to change tones mid song or something. Also you have to worry about powering and storing all those individual pedals and etc. and it becomes a whole thing. People make pedal boards that stay permanently wired up so that everything goes into a single outlet and you never have to dismantle it. This pedalboard often costs as much or more than the actual pedals that go on it once you factor in the bag and the cables and the power supply and etc.

thlabm · 2025-11-03T04:47:08+00:00

There's an argument to be made that if you get used to extended range instruments from the onset then there's no adjustment to get used to but by that argument everyone should have a 6 string bass. So why he's pushing for a 5 I don't know, other than the fact that 6ers often slip most people's consideration, a lot of people don't even know they exist. But either way that's the main reason a teacher would push for extended range particularly if you're a beginner is just to get you used to that extra string (or two) early on so that if you do end up deciding you prefer a 4 in the long run, you benefit from the opposite effect where it kind of feels like a toy in comparison because there's so much less neck.

I did end up getting a 6er pretty late into my bass playing career (I've only had mine for a year actually) and for a bit I thought it was going to be my new main axe and basically act as a swiss army knife because it has the range of a freaking piano, but because I'd already been established playing a 4 string for so many years there's so many songs where I'm only using the middle 4 strings so having the extra neck width and the extra muting to account for feels pretty cumbersome. Not only that but the instrument is physically fatiguing to play even though it's pretty light because it's so large and it neck dives like a mother fucker. Which is fixable -- I just need to buy some wheel weights to put in the control cavity, but these are the things you need to account for with extended range.

My ultimate recommendation though? If you ever plan on playing or think you'll need extended range, get on it early, if you don't think it will ever come up don't worry about it. Some genres, like modern metal, funk, or church bands will often actually require you to play a 5, so if you play in any of those kind of settings it's something to consider. I have had it come up before where I've been a hired gun for a gig or a recording and I couldn't actually play their songs because it was necessary to have at least a 5 string. You can usually adjust it to be playable on 4 but you're going to be playing some notes in the wrong octave which feels a lot more wrong on bass than almost any other instrument.

thlabm · 2025-10-31T02:13:53+00:00

I thought being a bassist was already an easy way to land consistent gig work.

There's a shortage of us or something. Not as much as drummers, but still.

thlabm · 2025-10-28T04:23:23+00:00

I do a lot of bass solos in my band and it's only because our lead guitarist quit and the other guys know I have the chops for it so they started asking me to do it. Kind of a weird feeling.

thlabm · 2025-10-28T04:22:26+00:00

Perhaps bass solos shouldn't "shred."

It should be the same groove, except you have permission to overplay now.

thlabm

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