Favorite Bass recording approach & gear?

  • Thread starter Thread starter CoolCat
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I'm guessing you are talking electric bass guitar.

I really like the sound of my jaguar on its own, so I usually record it directly into my interface (Focusrite Scarlett). I might use a virtual amp inside my DAW, but most often I just eq and compress it just a bit. I keep bass right in the middle with the kick, and the main vocal line. Guitars and other instruments get panned.

You can go direct like that, or you could mic your amp, or mix them both (like Sting did on a lot of those Police records).
 
DI is my go to for bass. Adding an amp and/or a compressor to the chain is a luxury.
 
I've always recorded direct & dry, except when I used my '65 Hofner - I added a Boss Compressor Sustainer pedal.
 
Anyone heard a big difference in DI boxes? Active or passive? Interface Instrument inputs are DI arent they?
 
There are several very important parts to recording bass guitar. I hear a lot of recordings that do not pay attention to some of these aspects and to me, the performance and the impact of the music suffers.

First. Make sure you can hear the fundamental. It doesn't do the music any good if the difference between F and F# isn't apparent.

This is accomplished by choosing the right instrument with the right strings and pick-ups suited to the music. An example would be : Having a bass that sounds like Geddy Lee and using it on a Jazz, Country, or Blues influenced track. It may sound GREAT on it's own but it doesn't "fit" the style.

Notice I didn't say anything about the player....Geddy Lee can play the phone book so it's not the playing I'm talking about , it's the sound of the instrument being captured.

Second. The arrangement of the bass instrument in the music.

It does nothing to promote impact, movement, or chordal development if the bass is playing over all the other parts. LESS is always MORE. Except when the bass is the feature and then all rules are out the window.

Third. The capture should be as 'clear' as possible.

Notice I didn't refer to it as "clean" . Bass instruments can (at times) have a bit of distortion or drive to them. Todays Pop music seems to have a lot of over-driven bass tones an as long as they fit into the arrangement it will work. But capturing clearly is the key. If you find your instrument has dead spots on the neck, or dead spots on the strings where a fundamental completely disappears during a musical run or a passage, you need to suss that out. It cannot be fixed unless you are taking a midi track with your recording. Some people actually do that BTW.

I've been a bass player for 50 years ...yeah out of the womb! And I have a decent collection of instruments to track with. It makes a difference! 4 strings, 5 strings....flat wounds, round wounds, half rounds.....active, passive....all combinations of instruments and NONE with dead spots on the necks.

My go-to recording devices are several mic pres with DI's, floor DI's....some active, some passive, some with transformers. For an older sounding track I use an Ampeg Flip-top amp. 1967 that's been recapped and has a modern speaker in it. It still has that nice thump and since it's basically new, it's reliable and very very quiet. I have a 62 P-Bass I like to use with this rig. It has the old style La Bella flat wounds on it and is "instant Motown" sound. I'll close mic it with an SM7, put a U87 out about 3 feet for some size and also take a DI. The three channels ALWAYS gives me anything I want and the DI can be routed through any number of VST sound libraries.

For a more 'modern' bass sound right from the capture, I have a very small single 12" German built Warwick bass amp. If the track is all about slapping or getting that growl, this delivers. It has a modern NEO JBL in it and a GREAT DI!

In my preamps rack I have an ADK pre that has one side as a dedicated bass DI. The Op-amp is designed like a Neve and the transformer is a Sowter. It' very warm and accurate and will fit most styles dependent on the instrument.

There's a reason for all of this and it's importance has been impressed on my workflow over the years. Bad bass captures will ruin a song. Bad instrument choices will ruin a song. And in this I am talking about the instrument set-up: sound, playing, arrangement.

It really gets down to the player at the end and the arrangement of the instrument in the song. An old trick when you are capturing an instrument that has way too much sustain and growl for the song and you don't have the luxury of another instrument choice is the old foam under the strings at the bridge. Don't over do it. Just a bit of pressure from a softer piece of open-cell foam and you're good to go.
 
I usually split my signal into a DI (which carries a lot of low end but very little definition) and a cheap crate with an 8" speaker (which is all definition and no body). Then I blend those signals to my liking with some EQ.
 
Start with a good bass player. Seriously. They'll usually hear in their monitor what needs to be done and fix it themselves on the bass or amp, and if they can't get it right, will tell you, and you'll figure it out from there.

A mic'd cabinet is useful for some players, but I usually go direct. If I'm micing, then I use a DI before the amp and track both. Live almost all modern amps have a useful DI that's sufficient for anything I've done. You can add amp/cab sim on top of that and blend if necessary.
 
The difference in DI boxes usually comes down to phase response. If you have an amp or preamp or something with a decent DI output (the key being "decent" - not all of them are) things should be good. The A-Designs Reddi and Ampeg Portaflex tube heads were designed for DI bass recording. A less expensive option is the Radial JDI. It's one of the best passive DI boxes.

As a general rule of thumb, passive DI boxes should work great with active signals. Active DI for passive signals.

Looking at some specs for the Radial JDI passive and J48 active,

J48:
Input impedance 220 K-Ohms
Output impedance 600 Ohms

JDI:
Input impedance 140 K-Ohms
Output impedance 150 Ohms

The idea with impedance matching is that low feeds high, for maximum signal transfer and minimum frequency corruption. 10:1 is about the minimum ratio you would want. Bad things happen below that. Consider a pickup with a relatively high output of say 15 K-Ohms (maybe a Gibson humbucker or something) connected to an amp with an input of 1 M-Ohms. This gives you a lot more than 10:1, and it's not a problem. The same pickup going into the passive JDI might start to give you some unwanted artifacts, whereas the J48 still maintains the 10:1 minimum. Also note that many passive pickups have less output impedance than 15K, so if it's around 7 or 8K, the passive JDI could still work and sound great.

A passive pickup will require greater input impedance of the device than say a keyboard or active signal with a lower output impedance. A poor mans workaround might be to use a Boss pedal or something in bypass in the chain as a buffer to drop the impedance. True bypass pedals won't work. You can check by seeing if the pedal will pass audio without power connected to it. If it needs a battery even in bypass, it should be buffered.

Having said that, I'm a fan of using a decent mic in front of a decent amp for recording bass. A SansAmp or amp modeling on a DI signal can help if it's not practical to mic an amp. A quality DI that gives you the full, clean signal is a big help if that's your preferred route.
 
I have an Eleven Rack that has a good Ampeg model in it that I often use. The bass player in my band plays a Mark Bass amp with a direct out on the back, so we use that to record him.

I recently recorded a band and the bass player wanted to use his amp instead of my Eleven Rack, and he wanted me to mic his amp although he had a direct out on the back of his amp. So I just recorded both. Probably 75-80% of the bass in the final mix was the direct out.
 
I have an active Warwick that goes straight into the interface.

After the event I might add some compression. Rarely any EQ.
 
snow lizard said:
10:1 is about the minimum ratio you would want. Bad things happen below that. Consider a pickup with a relatively high output of say 15 K-Ohms (maybe a Gibson humbucker or something) connected to an amp with an input of 1 M-Ohms. This gives you a lot more than 10:1, and it's not a problem. The same pickup going into the passive JDI might start to give you some unwanted artifacts, whereas the J48 still maintains the 10:1 minimum.
Click to expand...
But impedance is almost never just one number. It is frequency dependent. The DIs are probably pretty close to flat over out frequencies of interest, but the pickup has a large inductive component which means the impedance gets big fast as the frequency goes up. That humbuckers might be 15K resistance at DC, but the impedance at 5KHz is 125KOhms! Even a 1M input doesn't quite get us to 10:1, but...

...The input impedance is usually in parallel with the load from the pots on the guitar. You'd probably have 500K for V and T for that pickup. Without getting too far into the math, when two impedances are in parallel, the total equivalent value is never larger than the smallest. If both are the same, the value is half, and as one gets bigger than the other, the total approaches the smaller value. So 500K V and T parallels to look like 250K by itself, and you'd like your load impedance to be about 10x that in order not to make things any worse.

Now, a passive DI doesn't have much impedance of its own in either direction. What it does is "reflect" the impedance of whatever is attached to it. In practice, that means that the effective impedance is some multiple of the device at the other end. What you multiply by depends on the turn ratio. In a typical DI this factor should be around 130. So, the InZ (the load the bass sees) will 130x the impedance of the mic pre you plug it into. That will very often be like 1.5K, which comes out a little bigger than the JDI you cited, but still not big enough for my tastes. To be fair, though, I think a lot of people like these because of the way they shave off the very top edge of typical instruments. 15K is not typical by any means. 3K-8K is more realistic for most people.

That active DI is also a lot smaller than most amp inputs. Again, I guess if you're trying to use this with as little processing as possible, it'll cut the zing maybe just enough. Heck, I've gotten some really great bass sounds plugging right into a 10K line input. It was like a free speaker sim and got us that deep, rounded, country bass feel we needed. OTOH - if you run into something more like 500K or 1M, you've got all the treble your bass could possibly give you available, and you can turn that T pot down if you feel the need.

I always just plug into a buffered-bypass pedal and that into a line input, probably an amp sim, and then I'm rocking.
 
ashcat_lt said:
Now, a passive DI doesn't have much impedance of its own in either direction. What it does is "reflect" the impedance of whatever is attached to it. In practice, that means that the effective impedance is some multiple of the device at the other end. What you multiply by depends on the turn ratio. In a typical DI this factor should be around 130. So, the InZ (the load the bass sees) will 130x the impedance of the mic pre you plug it into. That will very often be like 1.5K, which comes out a little bigger than the JDI you cited, but still not big enough for my tastes. To be fair, though, I think a lot of people like these because of the way they shave off the very top edge of typical instruments. 15K is not typical by any means. 3K-8K is more realistic for most people.
Click to expand...

The main thing the JDI has going for it is the sound quality. It's a nice direct box.
 
I plug direct into the interface. I used to use a little EQ and an 1176 plug to smash it to taste. The tone was very "growly" and articulate. Nice highs and lows, but not a typical bass tone as expected in a classic rock type of tune. The bass was a Yamaha with a P/J pickup config. I used both pickups.

Now I use the UAD Ampeg sim plug then the 1176 to smash it. I get a classic bass tone. I'm using either a P-Bass or a custom built with a J bass pickup config and active pre.
 
I can't say I get the greatest sounding bass, but I plug direct in, sometimes an amp sim, sometimes just EQ and fool around with the sound until I like it.

The one thing I started doing is putting foam on the strings and really like that dead sound. I read about somewhere on the board, looked at a couple of links, but I really dig the sound it gives. Sometime I take out the foam, but not often. Maybe it covers up my less than stellar playing. But it is different and noticeable.
 
An SVT or decent simulation thereof is like cheating for most things on the rock side of the world. A good bassist (!!!) and a decent bass and you plug into the SVT and turn the knobs till it sounds good. Shouldn't need any compression or limiting or EQ or anything. Done. Print it. Next. ;)
 
I'll vouch for that SVT remark. My first NEW setup was an SVT Single Stack 8x10. Bought new in 1978 for $700. A week later after a birthday gig, our fill-in guitarist "had to have it" and bought it from me the next day for $700. He didn't want the same thing from the same store.. he wanted mine. Go figure. I was only using a beat-up old SG bass with 2 year old flat-wound strings. Now if an amp can make that guitar sound that good.... well..
 
The DI out from my Gallien-Krueger MB500 head goes through an outboard compressor and then to the interface. For the P-Bass, that's it. For the J-Bass, I'll usually add an Empress compressor in front of the amp with a minimal gain reduction, 2-4 dB. No sims, no ITB processing except a high pass at 50Hz. Every song I've tracked over the last three years or so has used this system. Stupid simple and works every time.
 
At one point, we were getting so many gigs I got tired of lugging speaker cabinets all over 4 States. I bought a new Roland GP-16 and just used that for live gigs DI'd into the sound board. We played for a college music department's graduation and their sound man had no idea what to do with the cable end I was handing him. He couldn't accept the fact I didn't have an amp and cabinet to mic. I told him where to stick it - literally.
 
DM60 said:
The one thing I started doing is putting foam on the strings and really like that dead sound. I read about somewhere on the board, looked at a couple of links, but I really dig the sound it gives. Sometime I take out the foam, but not often. Maybe it covers up my less than stellar playing. But it is different and noticeable.
Click to expand...

That's one way of using a "mute". It's quite common if that's the sound you want. Less sustain, less overtones but it can really focus the sound.

Going the other way, if you wanted to get more of a piano-like thing happening with the overtones from roundwound strings (possibly stainless for the brightness), there's really no substitute for fresh strings.
 
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