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What frequency is the warm tone


dannepop
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What frequency is the warm tone of a wooden cab?

I got problems with adding that to my sound with a L3t.

Must be somewere in the lower register or is it perhaps to reduce higher frequencys.

 

Has anyone looked into this before?

 

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You can spend the rest of your life searching for a "warm" frequency...but the aren't any. There are only tones that you like, and tones that you don't like.  Subjective terms like "warm" don't have a discrete physical or mathematical definition...if you line up 10 cabinets and run the same amp, with the same settings through all of them, you'll get 10 different sounds. The differences might be very subtle, or quite dramatic depending on the kind and number of speakers, the size of the cab, etc etc...but different they will be. Different also, will be the EQ adjustments required to reach the "warm" tone you have in your head. There is no magic number, or "one size fits all" EQ boost or cut that will instantly give you the sound you're looking for. You EQ for the speaker(s) you have,  the guitar you're playing,  and to a somewhat lesser extent (but still significant) the room you're standing in... in other words, even if there were such a thing as a "warm frequencies", the numbers will vary, depending on the scenario. 

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That L3T goes up to 19 kHz (!) and a typical guitar amp/cab maybe only around 5 kHz. Try rolling off the high end way down until it sounds good to yer ears. Boost a little between 300-500 Hz, but not so much it gets muddy. Try using just a bit of Teemah or Minotaur with some light gain early in your path. Have you tried some IRs, adjusting their treble and bass and mix?

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If you set up a guitar tone with too much bass frequency it will get in the spectrum space where the bassist lives and sound crap in the mix. So use the Parametric EQ block to cut at 100Hz and 12kHz as a default, and tighten it up as necessary.

 

And what Cruisinon said :-)

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The mid-focus frequencies for guitar are between 400 and 2k Hz expanding to between 120 and 5k Hz. But this is pretty subjective, just a rough guide. Generally guitar fits in the mid frequencies, out of the way of the bass, nice and distinct/articulate, and not ice-picky bright. Let other instruments in the band fill in these other frequencies. Note that distortion adds a lot of high order harmonics that contribute a lot of high frequency content that wouldn’t otherwise be there. Controlling the bass into distortion and the treble after distortion is the key to managing guitar tone. This is why Teemah! Is such a nice pedal. Bass cut is before clipping, and treble cut is after clipping. Plus you can choose symmetric or asymmetric clipping which helps voice the distortion. 

 

I always thought the only way to get a great woody/warm guitar tone was with a pushed poweramp, just the right magic speakers and an open back cabinet (to reduce muddy bass). Then I heard Matt Schofield. He gets a fantasticly warm tone out of a Strat with single coil pickups using a mostly clean amp and multiple gain staged pedals. Check out the great interview on That Pedal Show to see how he does it.

 

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Warmth also comes from harmonics.

Tubes have even ordered harmonics in tone. Solid state has odd numbered harmonics.

That alone changes the equation, and it's one of the reasons that solid state amps of the past always sounded harsh in comparison to a tube amp.

I'm assuming that the even numbered harmonics of a tube amp are able to be modeled with the rest of the amp...which would help explain why amp modeling sounds so much better than a solid state amp.

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Also check out Celestion’s Redback IRs. The 4x12 Cab model using a mix of three microphones sounds very warm to me. I use it to take the edge off active pickups. I also use a low cut EQ block first in my chain (before amp block) and a high cut EQ block at the end.

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