having trouble with the bass

Skyline609

New member
Hey everyone, just purchased a mid range ibanez bass, and have been trying a few ways to record. Ive noticed that each method has its good and bad sides, and im a little confused about what i can do to improve the quality of the bass track.

The first method i tried was plugging the bass directly into the mixer (studio 32) and using the pres on there as its amp. After a little eq'ing, it was acceptable.
The second method was micing a small 15 watt guitar amp with a 57 placed 2 inches from the speaker, directly in front of it.

It seemed like the direct approach had a real good bottom end, like a deep full tone, but, the sound in the mid and high frequencies seemed almost fake sounding. On the other hand, micing the little amp produced a pretty consistant sound, alot more realistic and punchy, but it was very shallow on the bottom end, and didnt give too much of a big deep tone.

After listening to the song with the various bass takes, i couldnt decide what to do. Im looking to get a deep, full tone, and clear all around. Would adding an active direct box do much for going directly to the mixer?? Im also getting alot of problems with hiss and some buzz, so its difficult to get a hot signal without compensating with an unpleasant amount of noise. Im very new to recording the bass guitar, im breaking out of the shell of just using my synth bass sounds(good old Alesis qs 7.1 deep bass). If anyone has any tips or anything, id be thrilled to hear. Thanks.
 
Bass amp

This is one possibility among others: Many bass amps have a line out jack on the back.My SWR SM-400S has an XLR direct out.You can use this plugged in to your mixer and at the same time put a mic on the amp's speakers.Send the direct (line) out to one recorder channel and the mic to another.When you're done with the whole song,you can play around with various combinations and levels of the two bass tracks and EQ 'till it sounds good with the rest of the mix.Some mics that work well on bass amps are the ElectroVoice RE20,the AKG D112,and the little Audix whose name I can;t remermber right now.
 
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