Has your bass stopped sounding? Pumping, crushing – it’s fine, but the sound is like being smothered by a pillow: no ringing or brightness. What could be the problem, and how can you find it and fix it?
Check the strings.
The sound starts with the strings – it’s an axiom. That’s why we start with them. Turn off the sound and yank the string. Snap it against the fret. Doesn’t it ring? Congratulations, it’s the strings.
Good bass strings cost as much as a single malt whiskey, so let’s not rush to throw them away. There are two ways to revive strings:
- …a strong solvent treatment..;
- boil them.
You can’t trust store-bought string cleaners; they can’t handle deep dirt. Only hardcore – white spirit, WD-40, or something similar.
First way: twist strings into a reel, put them into a glass jar, pour solvent on them and wait a few minutes. Then rinse thoroughly with water and immediately dry well with a towel or hair dryer.
If you don’t have a suitable container, you can simply pour a thin stream of white spirit over the strings while holding the strings in the air. Or spray it with a spray can, as in the case of WD-40. And, of course, you shouldn’t do it indoors – the smell will be hellish. Don’t forget to rinse the strings anyway.
Boiling – here everything is simple, as with pasta. You throw it in boiling water and wait five minutes. The only non-cooking detail is baking soda or detergent, you can add a little of it for better effect. But you can do without it.
Turn the knobs.
If it’s not the strings, then we move on to the dumbest method. Kind of like those old appliance manuals: Is the appliance not working? – Check to see if the appliance is plugged in. As ridiculous as it may seem, sometimes problems really don’t go beyond primitive causes. So, twist the tone knobs on the body of your bass. You’ll get the hang of it.
Check your amp’s equalizer
Go from simple to complex. Don’t snort, it’s the right vector. The knobs on the bass control the source, and the amp already works with the received signal. There, too, you can have the knobs turned up or the motors pushed in. Or the treble filter button is pressed. Rustle around in there. If you can’t handle it, ask a stagehand, there are amps with a tricky set of filters that aren’t intuitive to understand.
Ask the sound engineer.
If you’re not a sucker, your bass is on through the dibox, and the clean bass signal comes straight into the console, bypassing the combo. Ask your sound guy if the treble is okay. If it’s not okay there, don’t panic, you will do it in the next steps.
Eliminate the effects circuit.
If you use bumpers, check the sound bypassing them, just plug the wire directly into the amp or dibox. If the problem is solved – give a shout out to the bumpers. If not, then… (don’t panic).
Check the wire.
Not all musicians know this, but a bad or faulty wire may very well be leaking a signal. While giving the illusion of working, but “eating up” an inexcusable amount of frequencies. So your beautiful Fender sounds like a mattress made by the Kungur Bayan Factory. Change the wire.
Change the battery.
On basses with active electronics, a dead battery can ruin the sound.
Nothing helped?
Now panic, the electronics, the pickups, or the tone box is dead. Well, either that or congratulations. You’ve grown as a musician and have come to realize that your bass sucks. Whether or not that’s good news is up to you.