DeadPoet said:
Through miking you always lose/mask/attenuate/... frequencies, to lose freqs with electronics, I figure you'd had to have some *really* bad electronics..
Same opinion here; I just bought a higher-priced instrument because of the overtones it produces and the articulation you can get of it. Please don't give me an generic bass with dead strings through a boomy amp. In the end the cutting through the mix of the bass is *because* of all the harmonics present in your signal.
Herwig
I agree with you there. I`ve played thru some horrid outboard devices, and some that were a real turn on. The purest however, was always direct..
I have played bass thru most every type of device thats been made for electric bass since 1966. There has been some real technological milestones layed down since then. However getting from the vibration of the string and its ambience in the wood of the bass thru 1st, the pickups (analog) ... which often have been mistaken for the real sound, the onboard routing, the nondigital potentiometers, cabling, switching, preamping (often thru nondigital pot's as well), switching, cabling, switching, A/D conversion, sampling.... all of this wellllllll before hearing a damn thing reproduced, in milliseconds. In spite of "real" transparency, there are many events that transpire where a signal can be degraded in harmonic content. These variations in harmonic content at different points along the signal path are what give different basses their "signature" sounds. Same applies to FX devices. I can hear a difference between Alesis, Yamaha, Eventide Clockworks, or other outboard FX. I support recording clean and as direct as possible with the least points in the signal path as possible. Once the bass is sampled from its "real voice" into the digital realm, FX can be applied with transparency quite undetectable to the ear and all the content of the voice is there. Even cloning the data and routing it thru a DFX and merging is cool, and there is no degradation unless its mixed where the "fx'd" data masks content of the original voice.
Bass is, like any other instrument, filled with sonic qualities that are often overlooked when being recorded due to it not sonically being considered to have much content in its voice. This is not usually a result of bad ears or neglect by the engineer, its more from not being a highlighted study as other instruments that are dominant in the upper harmonic ranges.
Damn... does that make sense? hehehehe It was fun writing it anyways..
or whatever afterwards. 
