For 3 years now, I have been hearing people refer to the sound of round wounds as “bright”. Although I can hear the difference between rounds and flats, I have never been able to come up with my own description, nor have I been able to fully understand what people mean by “bright”.
I finally stumbled across a definition on the Fender site that makes perfect sense to me. Round wounds are more “piano-like”. Yeah, I get that!
Roundwound bass strings were developed by Britain’s Rotosound company in the early 1960s at the behest of the Who’s John Entwistle, who sought a brighter, more piano-like bass tone to complement his trebly and fleet-fingered lead bass style.
bright is a word to describe things on the higher end of the frequency spectrum vs things that are warm, fat, etc are on the low end typically. If you look at an eq, you can see when something is bright, it may have upper harmonics with a principal harmonic being lower. It’s sort of the difference between your open E and an open G. Producers use adjectives to describe sound, warm, wide, muddy, etc which tend to align to places on the spectrum when eq’ing.
@sully provided a very good technical answer. My question was more how one might describe the sound without the use of an EQ instrument. I still favor the “piano-like” description.
The brightness I like from bass is obviously when slapping but personally not the entire time. I like when I execute some fills with sliding G string for example it has this crisp clean tone that gets notice. It works really well when you want to bark/ fart a 16th octave note it adds accent to the phrase.
The it usually doesn’t affect the low end unless you misfret it sounds just like another string types. It adds in my book. This is what round does so well in general.
This is the one I am leaning towards for a Rhodes.
This collection goes on sale, no?
I think the stand alone Stage 73 is like $149, which is a lot just for that, and the $599 for the whole collection doesn’t make it more appealing.
What’s the normal discount they do and when?
Black Friday?
Yep, V Collection as a whole, and the individual instruments as well, go on sale a couple times a year. Black Friday always, and other sales occasionally. Should be able to pick it up for roughly half price (either standalone, or all of V Collection at half off). I think I paid $300 for V Collection.
Totally worth it.
That said Analog Lab has a lot to play with if you just want to try it out as well.
fairly regularly, yeah. I got V Collection 7 for half off once upon a time. The Audio Production Deals subreddit and Discord are good resources to be notified of when. And as Howard said, Analog Lab gets you most of the way there; you just can’t access the GUI of the plugins, but get all the presets (maybe not all. I’m not sure and have never compared) and a modest amount of customization of the sound.
Owning other Arturia products gets significant discounts, even if you happen to pick them up for free/cheap.
I like it. When I read it, I began to think about the low notes of a piano; they are unmistakable. They definitely have a brightness to them, a character to them, that is inimitable.
