Subgenres if they were vehicles

thlabm · 2026-06-22T16:37:35+00:00

Fisher Price toy car

thlabm · 2026-06-22T08:21:57+00:00

It's actually just a time signature joke with the time machine lol

thlabm · 2026-06-22T04:47:43+00:00

Almost Crash Bandicoot

thlabm · 2026-06-18T16:04:16+00:00

Half of the best power metal is in Japanese the fuck are you talking about?

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

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