How to get bass to sound like this
- Thread starter echobeach
- Start date
rob aylestone
Moderator
It's unusual, but the same pattern just played in different places. I'd consider some notes a strange choice, but as they're repeated over and over again, it's an artistic decision I guess. What were you thinking? You like it, don't like it?
I meant "what's going on" in terms of the sound, the production, the processing, rather than the musical composition or performance. Yes, I like the bass sound and I'm wondering how the engineer or bassist obtained it.
It might not be immediately obvious how unusual the bass sounds from listening to the song in isolation. You can hear the entire compilation it was on below. The song starts at 14:55. Start listening a few minutes before this point, then listen to a few songs after. When you do this, the bass really jumps out at you.
VomitHatSteve
Hat STYLE. Not contents.
Broke 80s punk band with a dry, lows heavy tone? It's probably a DI
Probably a very cheap bass. Based on the lack of attack and sustain, it might even be fretless.
He's playing in the higher registers in general too.
Probably a very cheap bass. Based on the lack of attack and sustain, it might even be fretless.
He's playing in the higher registers in general too.
rob aylestone
Moderator
It doesn't jump out at me for any reason. Maybe you had to like punk. I hated it. I think you might be attributing something magical to what was usually, back then, plug and play. I suspect Steve is right. Just plugged in and thrashed and that's what you get. I remember a friend in a punk band back then and in a magazine he read about how this was done and that was done and the rawness and energy were created. His memory was the drummer saying he was going for fish and chips and 9 and if it wasn't done they could all F off. He went for his chips, and what was released was just what was recorded before everyone got stressed and bored. I'm sure a few recordings were well honed and multi-takes, but studio time was expensive and if you started at the same time, finished at the same time and nobody got too bad in the middle it was a tick in the box!
You may be right about the DI. It's hardly a high-fidelity recording. But I've been recording various basses DI for over 25 years and have never obtained a sound like that, not even plugging a bass direct into a cassette portastudio.
Perhaps the bass is cheap, but it's probably not fretless, then, as I don't recall fretless basses being inexpensive.
LazerBeakShiek
Rad Racing Team
Fretless basses have always been cheaper.....Expensive nickle is in the frets. The companies save money with less material costs.
I'm not attributing anything magical to anything. I'm simply using my ears. The bass in that song sounds quantitatively different from the others. I'm trying to determine what those quantities are. Whether you like the song or punk in general is irrelevant. This is a technical forum and my question was a technical, not an artistic, one.
To me, there's something going on with that bass that is similar to the bass in some 1970s disco music. Maybe it's compression or EQ. Maybe they were using one of those black boxes used in discotheques to add bass harmonics.
Have they? I don't see what material costs have to do with it. The smaller the market for something, the higher the cost to the consumer, regardless of the materials used. Fretless basses have always been a niche product.
Even today fretless basses are more expensive than their fretted counterparts, let alone back in 1984 when there weren't budget lines like Squier and Epiphone:
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Long & McQuade is Canada`s biggest music store offering a huge selection of musical instruments and music lessons across Canada. Guitars & Drums!
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LazerBeakShiek
Rad Racing Team
It is? It's just people, man. We like to record at home.
Do some research on the band in 1984. See if there are studio pics. Also limit selections to what equipment was around then. If it was a DI into the desk, try a DI. Steve knows what's up. The two DI's I hear and see a lot on youtube were, the Tech 21 Sansamp DI, and the Line 6 Bass Pod XT Pro Rack. Have you tried either of those? There is a video claiming the Bass Pod has 100,000,000+ models and combinations.
Papanate
Well-known member
The Bass is bandwidth limited - and probably something like a 4001.
rob aylestone
Moderator
The reason the baseline is different is that it's syncopated in this case a kind of anti-rhythm that is not in the remainder of the parts or the drums. Add to this the fact is it's playing a higher twiddly bit makes it a bit different to the bass lines used in the genre. It's a bit similar to early Split End, which had similar bass lines but was a bit gentler than punk. I've never heard music described as quantitatively different. The rest of the song is pretty naturally quantised, but the bass line pulls and pushes alongside the pulse of the drums, which is a bit clever (maybe too clever) for the genre as a whole - so kind of unusual. I don't think it's fretless because I tried to play it on my fretless and I'd need some serious practice to get the intonation right with the right rhythm and accents. It's too repetitive to be done on a fretless with the level of technology available back then. Now, we could fix everything and copy and paste, back then, they had to play it for real.
Excuse me for thinking a subforum called "Mixing Techniques" is related to technical matters.
Thanks for the advice, but I'm not about to embark on a wild goose chase. I'm not obsessed, just curious as to what was going on in the mix there.
Hey, finally an answer that's on topic instead of "punk sucks" or arguing about the cost of fretless basses!
Yeah, it also seems like the guitar has had a lot of lower frequencies cut and the drums have some modulation effect on them, maybe phaser, which makes the bass more prominent in the mix.
I've wondered if maybe the bass wasn't run through something like a Mu-tron phaser (a favorite of all those old dub reggae guys) on a really slow sweep so that it was acting more like a static resonant filter.
rob aylestone
Moderator
Whoa - it takes time to get a feel for a new forum. In our defence, you kind of posted a very non-technical question, open to many interpretations, and the one we took was that you were talking about the style of the playing - either not sitting right or being a bit unconventional. I certainly didn't think we were talking about the mix - the mix is what a great deal of tracks from that time were - a bit of a mess, but correct for the rawness of the genre.
Perhaps we should start again. What exactly is the reason you posted? What were you hoping to get back? You never said - so we're groping in the dark. You said
You really know how to find the etiquette of a forum with your post
You know - maybe a few folk here might draw some conclusions. Next time - maybe ask a sensible question and explain it a bit better before kicking off!
Perhaps we should start again. What exactly is the reason you posted? What were you hoping to get back? You never said - so we're groping in the dark. You said
Lazer, who's normally into playing said it - DI'd bass - hens e the cleanish but funkily played tone. I don't know what's going on in the mix - many recordings of that type (and in the 80s I had to suffer quite a few of these sessions) were about getting levels up, rough EQ, hardly any effects - maybe compression on the vocals and drums and not much more. Raise faders to taste and that was about it - raw and undeveloped sonically. Many punk bands hated post production. They wanted the recordings as quickly was possible.
You really know how to find the etiquette of a forum with your post
You know - maybe a few folk here might draw some conclusions. Next time - maybe ask a sensible question and explain it a bit better before kicking off!
The Crass Bullshit Detectors were notoriously lo-fi. One guy has even written an article calling them "shit-fi":
Bullshit Detector | Shit-Fi
shit-fi.com
A lot of the material on those compilations were from people sending in cassettes that were literally recorded on their boomboxes. But that's what I liked about punk and cassette culture: it was open to anyone and you didn't have to be a virtuoso rock star with access to a million dollar studio. Today all the garage bands sound like they're recorded in million-dollar studios but seem to largely be lacking the heart and creativity of the Crass Bullshit bands.
My question was "How to get bass to sound like this?" What's ambiguous about it? Maybe you should stop blaming your reading comprehension problem on others.
I don't know if there's a way to block people on this forum but if not I am at the very least going to ignore you from now on. You haven't made a single useful or relevant contribution to this thread so far and have been trying from the beginning to provoke something, first by suggesting that my taste in music sucks, then by insinuating that I'm imagining things. I don't have time to deal with your kind. Take a hike, troll.