Scooping

Doug

Many of you are very experienced and may be way familiar with this technique, but for those who've not tried it...

Usually I set my old Mustang's tone and volume controls all the way up and use just the bridge pup. My amp settings are usually:

Gain 7;

Treble 10;

Mid 7;

Bass 3;

...and these 46 year old pups produce a gutsy rock'n roll tone.

Tonight a buddy turned me on to what he called scooping. I kept my gain at 7 and changed:

Treble to 10;

Mid to 1 (scooped);

Bass to 10.

Holy sheise! It sounded like the Stones had come over to jam! So I'm curious what others' experiences with amp scooping are like.

feedbackismyfriend

Doug said:
Many of you are very experienced and may be way familiar with this technique, but for those who've not tried it...
Usually I set my old Mustang's tone and volume controls all the way up and use just the bridge pup. My amp settings are usually:
Gain 7;
Treble 10;
Mid 7;
Bass 3;
...and these 46 year old pups produce a gutsy rock'n roll tone.
Tonight a buddy turned me on to what he called scooping. I kept my gain at 7 and changed:
Treble to 10;
Mid to 1 (scooped);
Bass to 10.
Holy sheise! It sounded like the Stones had come over to jam! So I'm curious what others' experiences with amp scooping are like.

my amp doesn't have any eq other than a bright/mellow switch and a tone control and my fuzz pedal doesn't have any form of eq either so it's not something I mess around with all that much.

that being said my experience in doing that is that it doesn't really work for my style, although I have got some gnarly metal tones before with scooped mids. Still not really my thing.

HNB

I thought about buying an eq pedal to try it out because my head also just has a tone knob and a volume knob. Need to recover money from my last purchases first.

Doug

HNB said:
I thought about buying an eq pedal to try it out because my head also just has a tone knob and a volume knob. Need to recover money from my last purchases first.

Yeah, my friend explained that scooping is often done with a pedal or some other device attached to the amp. Mine is a Peavey Classic 30 and happens to have these EQ controls.

Richie

I didn't realise scooping your mids was such a novelty?

I have my T-Rex Bloody Mary (metal distortion) set up with precisely 0 mids and the bass and treble fairly high (slightly more bass than treble though).

Can't do it with my amp though as either channel only has volume, bass and treble controls.

feedbackismyfriend

Richie said:
I didn't realise scooping your mids was such a novelty?

This was basically my reaction as well, but I just figured what the heck and decided to play along

Also, I love how none of us have mid controls on our amps. I dunno why, just find it kinda amusing.

Richie

feedbackismyfriend said:
Also, I love how none of us have mid controls on our amps.

Fo shizzle dawg, that's how we roll.

I might've considered trying to find a guide or schematic to mod mine for one, I've done enough other stuff to it that it's not going to affect its resale value. It's already pretty versatile in spite of its simplicity though, so I dunno if there's much point.

HNB

feedbackismyfriend said:
This was basically my reaction as well, but I just figured what the heck and decided to play along
Also, I love how none of us have mid controls on our amps. I dunno why, just find it kinda amusing.

LOL My distortion pedals have more tone knobs than my amp. 😀

plyta

There are couple of things to consider.

You might be going for that particular sound but guitar is a midrange frequencies instrument, you just need to give it to her 😛

There is one big issue you need to remember if you scoop the mids and you're playing in a band and especially in live situations: you are running very high risk being buried alive in the mix and starting sound level wars with your fellow band mates.

I personally run my eq roughly: 2.5-treble, 7.5-mids, 5.0-bass.

And I'm keen on getting a tubescreamer to boost the mids even more for certain aplications.

I'm using thick strings, low tunings, hotter than "average" pickups, gainier than "average" amp and bass cabinet and this eq works best for my ears 😀

irish_punk13

I've tried it before, and I can't stand the sound. I just like my mids too much.

I play through a bass amp with these settings:

Bass:8

Mids:10

Treble:6/7

This seems to get me a pretty good tone.

Earth

T5 M8 B5 is what I use on a twin reverb then on my Metal Muff I have the mids at 0. Its an active EQ whih either adds or decrees. It goes -5 or +5. Or on a BMP I have the mids at about 1 oclock or bypassed altogether.

Scooped mids can be used obviously but isn't needed even in metal. Take Slayer for instance, they boost the mids not scoop them. Kerry King's EQ looks like a upside down smile.