![]() ![]() A more physical player may have a bit of growl already in his or her sound, but a player with a subtler attack may be able to get that desired sound easier from an instrument with low action.īass construction covers a lot of things, but for this analysis I only want to look at the materials in the instrument and how the neck is attached to the bass. A bassist who really pulls, picks or slaps the strings hard will have a very different envelope to each note than someone who ‘feathers’ the strings. So this is just dipping a toe into the ocean.Īre you an aggressive, physical player or is your touch light? The impact of your style of play on the overall sound you get is something many players overlook and it is absolutely crucial to getting the correct end result. This means the way you activate the strings, what those strings are and even your cables have a part in your tone, not just the woods in the bass, its scale length (or lengths), your amp and your speakers. No preamps, amplification or effects here.Ī quick caveat for all discussions of tone and electric instruments: every element between your brain and the sound leaving the speaker (or signal out of a mixing board for those in recording) contributes to tone. For the sake of what I’m writing today, the factors I’ll discuss are attack, bass construction and pickups. It could be the snarl of Larry Graham in the 70’s or the dark edge of Mick Karn in the 90’s. And also like most of these things, this particular term means a lot of different things to people. If I don’t know what someone’s idea of growl is, I can’t help them get what they’re after. Like most of the terms I deal with, the starting point is defining what something means. The process never really ends, but it does bring me to the topic of this piece: growl. Like a lot of us, what began with finding a way to hear what I was doing on stage grew into trying to understand what makes up the components of a sonic signature. Even though I’ve been a musician for most of my life, one of the few things I’ve discovered is that knowing something and being able to express it are not even close to the same thing. ![]() ![]() In a lot of ways exploring this has meant learning another language, one that is more about sensation and emotion that anything quantifiable. Resident expert, Stew McKinsey, tackles this topic with accuracy and honesty.Īs much as I’ve loved the phrase ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture,’ a big part of my day to day existence is actually dedicated to writing and talking about the nebulous mysteries of tone and sound. Like most tone adjectives, Growl is in the ear of the beholder. First in the Find Your Tone series, Growl is a tone descriptor we are asked for often. ![]()
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