Tone Controls and Equalization

drum! You want to wake up the guitar player who’s been drilling your ears with his Marshall all night!

Turn to the FIRST band of the semi-parametric EQ. Set the frequency knob to approximately 60Hz (9 o’clock). Boost the Level control to about +6 dB (3 o’clock). This should provide the air and impact to carry the notes. To clean up the midrange, adjust the frequency control of the middle band on EQ 1 to 800 Hz (3 o’clock). Adjust the Level control to –8 dB (8:30). All things being fair- ly equal, you should have a great slap sound, with dynamics, impact, and clarity.

Go back to finger-style. It may be too thin-sounding and the notes are not “even,” with some being quite loud and others hardly audible. Flick the EQ select switch to EQ 2 (far right). The LED to the left of the first band should now be lit. Your original finger tone set with the Enhancer, Bass and Treble should still be intact, for the most part.

Since finger styles are so vastly different from player to player, as opposed to a slap style, it is fairly hard to direct the user to specific frequencies with cut and boost parameters. Instead, we will give you several tones (frequencies) for you to experiment with as suggested by some of our noted professional users:

Jimmy Haslip: 80 Hz (first band), +10 dB; 200 Hz & 400 Hz (2nd band), + 2 dB; 1kHz (3rd band), +8 dB

Ricky Minor & Neil Stubenhaus: 40 Hz, +3 dB; 250 Hz, + 4 dB; 1kHz, +3 dB

Charles Frichtel: 100 Hz, +6 dB; 600 Hz, +5 dB; 2.5kHz, –4 dB

Michael Manring: 120 Hz, –2 dB; 1kHz, –6 dB; 6kHz, +2 dB

Dean Cortez: 120 Hz, +5 dB; 600 Hz, +3 dB; 1kHz, +5 dB

Try using each group by itself. As you try them, make a note of the frequencies that are pleasing to your ear and the ones that aren’t. Then, make up your own group. Once you’re finished, plug in your footswitch, stand a few feet from your speakers, turn it up a little, and play a few slap licks with EQ 1 activated. Then switch to EQ 2 and play a groove.

EQ SELECT SLIDE SWITCH

This switch allows you to manually select either EQ 1 (far left position), EQ 2 (far right position), or EQ 1+2 (middle position).

To activate the bottom 3 bands of semi-parametric EQ, select the EQ 1 position. To activate the top three bands, select the EQ 2 position. The LED will light at this position, indicating it is active. We did not provide an LED for EQ 1 as this could confuse you from a distance. So, if the LED is lit, you’re using EQ 2. If it is not, you’re using EQ 1 or EQ 1+2. Remember, you cannot select EQ 1+2 with the footswitch, just one or the other.

When EQ 1+2 is chosen with the slide switch, all 6 bands of equalization are active. Because the two bands are in parallel with each other, there are two conditions to be aware of in the EQ 1+2 mode: there will be a +4dB boost in overall gain; and cut and boost will be ±7 dB, as opposed to ±15 dB. Normally, if two bands were both set to the same frequency, and both boosted +15 dB for a total of +30 dB, “motorboating” (low frequency oscillation) or feedback (high frequency oscilla- tion) could occur and damage speakers. For this reason, and the fact that more than 15 dB of boost or cut is rarely required, we chose this configuration. If you should require more than the 7 dB offered for any one band in the EQ 1+2 mode, set two bands at the same frequency and boost or cut both of them for a total of 15 dB.

6 • SM-900 USER GUIDE