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Please describe midrange tone

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2/24/2006 8:55 PM

Please describe midrange tone

Please describe midrange tone for me, as I am and have been told I cant hear midrange like most guitarists do. Just describe a sound or point out a song or guitar tone with a lot of mids and maybe some with no mids or really cut mids. My buddy a great guitarist has a great ear for frequencies, he can listen to a monitor mix and tell you what freq needs to be added or lowered, he can hear feedback and know exactly which freq is causing it, I cant even tell you whether it was a bass or treble, he can give you exact numbers on the frequencies. I'm just tone deaf when it comes to mid frequencies. Thanks.

GG.

2/24/2006 9:32 PM
Roscoe	Which mids? Low mids, mid mids, high mids? Seriously, talking through a megaphone is a good idea of mids, talking on a phone, etc. Borrow a 5 band eq and play around with it and your guitar, you'll find out what mids are.

2/24/2006 10:34 PM
Dave Stephens	Roscoe thats a great idea, Danelectro has a cheap very good equalizer pedal, you can almost use it as a clean boost too.....

3/8/2006 3:51 PM

Ok I got an EQ 10band, I found out what different midrange levels sounded like. Now here is the kicker, I have read a lot of places where people say the original PAF's lacked midrange???? What I hear is more of a spike in mids, am I crazy or just cant hear what everyone else is hearing? To me a good PAF has a midrangey kind of hollow sound, like the sound I heard on the EQ when I bumped the 1K range up, i think it was the 1K, the middle one if that helps. Kind of an awl sound, kinda hollow?

GG

3/8/2006 4:56 PM
Greg Simon	The thing about PAFs that always struck me was that they are powerful, but still relatively clean and articulate. They have more bass and less treble than a Strat, and kind of a scooped midrange sound to my ears at least. Greg

3/9/2006 6:55 AM

I always thought that the 'hollow humbucker midrange' came from having certain frequencies cancelling. There's still a lot of midrange, but certain narrow bands have been cancelled out (is this a form of comb-filtering?). Maybe due to coils being at different locations under the string?

In any case, the difference between a bridge humbucker (especially an overwound one) and a neck single-coil (especially an underwound one) illustrates (to me anyway) two extremes of lots of mids and scooped.

3/9/2006 1:48 PM

I have been doing some testing and I have found that when I install the lead wire just through the hole in the baseplate and solder it it sounds fine but when I run the braided lead through the hole in the baseplate and run it along the edge of the baseplate to the other end and solder it and use it kind of like a spacer it gives the pickup more of the PAF tone or frequency thing you mentioned. Maybe it does something to the magnetic field when I run it along the length of the base plate instead of just through the hole and anchor it there. Opinions on this anyone?
PS. I used the same pickup for the test, just repositioned the lead wire.

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