Markbass Studio Pre - Manual (Page 15)

15
LOW frequencies constitute music’s sonic foundation—they give power to your sound, physically resonating your listeners’ bodies (and yours!), sometimes even causing people to move and dance!
MIDs make your bass sound loud, projecting the sound over long distances, “filling the room,” and they convey the pitch of the notes that you play. Clarity of this range ensures that the melodies in your bass lines are
heard. If detail is missing in this range, your melodic contribution to the music will suffer.
HIGH frequencies carry the percussive content of your playing—the attack of your notes, the sound of your finger or pick passing over the string, fret noise, and in the case of slap bass, the “tick” noise produced when
the strings bounce off the frets.
If any one of these frequency ranges is neglected or poorly represented by your amp, you are not hearing an accurate representation of the sound that your bass is generating.
Since the STUDIO PRE has been designed to give you clear, detailed and musical sound at all frequencies, when the amp is set “flat”—with all EQ knobs at 12 o’clock—you should hear a very true mirror of the sound
of your bass.
However, the following circumstances will require you to use equalization:
1. The signal from your bass is lacking output level in one of the frequency ranges described above;
2. The musical context of your recording dictates that the sound of your bass be altered to better suit the style of music or the song, or to blend better with the other sounds on the recording;
3. In live applications, if the room or venue you’re playing in has poor acoustics and excites a certain frequency. For example, if you’re playing on a hollow stage, certain low frequencies may sound
disproportionately loud or out-of-control, and you may notice that every time you play a certain note, it sounds much louder than all the others. In these cases the offending frequency needs to be
identified and reduced.
Equalization should be treated as fine-tuning. Spend some time listening to your bass through the amp with all the EQ controls in the neutral (12 o’clock) position before you start changing the settings. You’re likely
to need little or no equalization!
However, if and when equalization is required, you will find this amp’s EQ to be powerful and impressively detailed.
In addition to the PURE PARAMETRIC FILTER EQ, the STUDIO PRE CLEAN SECTION features three bands of EQ:
The LOW EQ control (13) is set to a center frequency of 100 Hz. This means that it either boosts or cuts the volume of the frequencies around 100 Hz, to a maximum of 16 decibels.
The MID EQ control (15) boosts or cuts the frequencies around 800 Hz, by as much as 16 decibels.
The HIGH EQ control (17) boosts or cuts the frequencies around 4 kHz, by as much as 16 decibels.
CleAN OUT leVel
Turning the CLEAN OUT LEVEL (20) control adjusts the level of signal coming from the balanced CLEAN XLR OUT (28).