Fletcher Munson curves are one of the most important concepts for mid range instrumentalists to get their heads around. Not everything should sound good through headphones!
When I taught guitar in the late 1980s it was a truism that your amp sounds different at bedroom vs stage volume. The solution is to test your sound at stage loudness. Regarding microphones, you're right: they affect the sound. But so does everything else, including the room it was recorded in, how the mic was positioned, the mic preamp, the channel pre, the recording medium, etc, etc. There are so many imponderables in the signal chain it's less than useless to focus on one. We're not hearing any single element, we're hearing the entire chain: the end product. Focus on that. How does it actually SOUND? It's not enough to chop bass. You need to understand the sound of the room you're in. You need to understand that the same room with 50 people will sound dramatically different with 200 people. Is it long and low? Is it wide and high? Is there space behind the stage? There are so many variables most people will never learn them all, so the only viable course for the pro is to LISTEN and adjust accordingly. I think we need a course teaching players how to listen with their ears instead of their eyes.
While this is all true, I think generally speaking the modern sound system is designed to be very bass heavy as culturally that’s what we do in most genres now. While fine tuning may be necessary in some rooms, most of the time a bass cut is going to at least get you much closer to what you want!
I think I'll spend a bit of time recording and playing back - but this time with headphones. I might also use the JBL monitor's eq to set it so it sounds more like what the XLR connection will sent to the PA (I have an old Line 6 X3 Live which has XLR for PA plus 1/4" TRS for monitor and they are both active). Good thing I have an actual Marshall, so I can compare tone until I get close enough. Good pointers for sure, thanks for that.
Excellent video topic and explanation. Do you think cutting the bass frequencies using the Global EQ of a Modeler is sufficient to take Presets dialed in beautifully at home through Headphones, and make them sound just as good live?
It’s not far off! If you want to get really fancy, everything in the upper mids at around 3500hz onwards get’s translated backwards to 3100hz or so at loud volumes. Guitar tones have a lot of flavour in the range from 2000-5000hz, so this ends up as your tone getting slightly darker at higher volumes. You can try and dial in something a bit brighter and ‘glassier’ at home, with a few more upper mids than you would normally be comfortable with, and that will help to avoid any issues with that end of the eq curve.
@@Kerriben This is an important topic that a number of Modeler using guitarists have complained about when playing live. So the more they understand about how to remedy this issue the better. Thanks
