jake-owa
Banned
My favorite for bass is the senheiser 521. It has a nice woody tone to it.
M
Matt303
New member
Lots of ideas her so I thought I'd add my 10p worth. I had a lot of trouble recording bass, I tried DI and mic. I had the sound I wanted from the amp but found it aounded very different when recorded and placed in the track. The things I found out after many failures was as follows:
1 The bass in the track is very different from the bass you hear on its own i.e. what sounds like a great bass sound is often shite when in the track. Conversely a clicky buzzy apparently top heavy sound ofen changes completely when listened to with the rest of the track.
2 I always make sure before recording that I have some EQ sensitivity in the mid range sweep with the sound from source without worrying too much about how it sounds at that time. I found that the bass players normal sound used live had no real 150Hz ish 300Hz component so when it came to EQs during mixing I had no ability to change the sound in this range. The bass sounded 'woolly' with no real desinition whan placed in the track. I did this by asking the bass player to adjust the knobs on his bass until a mid sweep made some real difference to the sound. I think this is what Sjoko2 means?
3 Very small changes to the mic position has a profound affect on the recoreded sound (by very small I mean 1-2"). I found it so difficult to get this right that I abandoned using mics on their own and use a combination of direct into the desk and mics. I try to get as clicky a sound as possible from the mic. (Someone on this BBS had a link to an article about recording Chuck Rainey where they recorded the sound of his bass by close micing his fretboard it was a good article but i dont have the link anymore)
4 I use some compression to get control of the source as I'm recording to digital HD but try not to colour the sound. THe only time I added more was when I had a tune that had slap and finger style techniques but this was not entirely succesfull.
5 For a quick fix I use a J Station. This is the most usefull single £100 box I have. I can get better results with mic and DI and lot of effort but this does a great slap / fingerstyle combination. I used this on "I feel for you" www.nowhereradio.com/mobounce/singles
if you're interested.
Just my thoughts, I am no expert, the above has been discovered after many failed attempts.
1 The bass in the track is very different from the bass you hear on its own i.e. what sounds like a great bass sound is often shite when in the track. Conversely a clicky buzzy apparently top heavy sound ofen changes completely when listened to with the rest of the track.
2 I always make sure before recording that I have some EQ sensitivity in the mid range sweep with the sound from source without worrying too much about how it sounds at that time. I found that the bass players normal sound used live had no real 150Hz ish 300Hz component so when it came to EQs during mixing I had no ability to change the sound in this range. The bass sounded 'woolly' with no real desinition whan placed in the track. I did this by asking the bass player to adjust the knobs on his bass until a mid sweep made some real difference to the sound. I think this is what Sjoko2 means?
3 Very small changes to the mic position has a profound affect on the recoreded sound (by very small I mean 1-2"). I found it so difficult to get this right that I abandoned using mics on their own and use a combination of direct into the desk and mics. I try to get as clicky a sound as possible from the mic. (Someone on this BBS had a link to an article about recording Chuck Rainey where they recorded the sound of his bass by close micing his fretboard it was a good article but i dont have the link anymore)
4 I use some compression to get control of the source as I'm recording to digital HD but try not to colour the sound. THe only time I added more was when I had a tune that had slap and finger style techniques but this was not entirely succesfull.
5 For a quick fix I use a J Station. This is the most usefull single £100 box I have. I can get better results with mic and DI and lot of effort but this does a great slap / fingerstyle combination. I used this on "I feel for you" www.nowhereradio.com/mobounce/singles
if you're interested.
Just my thoughts, I am no expert, the above has been discovered after many failed attempts.