Originally Posted By: Gordon Scott

It may be that your desire for a "clean" sound is a bit at odds with your desire for "full, fat and fabulous".

Thanks for your perspective. But I’m not sure if we share the exact vocabulary. I distinguish distortion from harmonics.

I agree with the Reaper vid that Ray posted. At around 8:25 Kenny explains distortion very nicely with his BOD plug-in, he calls it “growly”. Others use terms like gritty or dirty. I believe bass distortion happens at relatively high bass frequencies. Revolution by the Beatles is a good example of distorted electric guitar. For the purposes of this thread I don’t want distortion in my bass tone and I don’t hear distortion in the Rain On Me track. In some rock songs you want distortion. But Rain On Me is not a rock song.

Harmonics, in my mind, are totally different from distortion. When you fret a note on the bass, the primary acoustic energy produced will be at a characteristic frequency. But lesser energy will be produced at multiples of that characteristic frequency. This has to do with the physics of how a plucked string in tension vibrates. I understand that these higher frequency tones are called harmonics. I do not want to remove these harmonics as they are not distortion. If you were to remove all harmonics (and assuming no distortion) you would be left with a pure sinusoidal tone as you point out. I can produce pure sine tones on my synth but that’s not what I want on my bass. I want to keep the harmonics but axe the distortion.

Kenny also addresses the subject of harmonics at around 4:40 with his ReaEQ plug-in. He is EQing/boosting the low(200Hz), mid(500 Hz) and high(3 kHz) ranges of his bass waveform to get the tone he wants. This too, is what I’m attempting in my Band Pass step but to a courser degree and I’m not boosting everywhere because I want a different tone than he does. And I think my tool can also surgically boost or attenuate similarly to what Kenny is doing. My task is to experiment/learn the parameters that will work for the tone I want.

But what I think I’m learning from Kenny is that the sequence order matters. At 4:19 he talks about EQing after compressing. The opposite of what I have in my signal chain diagram. I don’t (yet) understand why the sequence matters here but I trust what he says. It must be the acoustic equivalent of putting your pants on after you put your underwear on, not the reverse . . . . please, no jokes about not wearing any at all smile

[Side Bar: Notes Norton knows all about this from his nudist colony gig days.]

"The character of sound of all instruments is formed in very large part by the harmonics and/or overtones produced."
Agreed.

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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.