good bass tracks

R

rayoung

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anybody know how to get good bass tracks? i have an alesis 3620 compressor a little art tube mp and a regular guitar digitech 2101 effects processor/preamp- which of these should i use? and what settings? i also have a direct box , is that important to go into? what else do i need to get good bass sounds, every thing else in my mix sounds good but that. :monkey:
 
If it's a live bass and you're having trouble with it, the bass line might be too complicated. I find that makes it hard to fit it into the mix. I don't know maybe you mean the actual sound, but try and listen to see if it really is the sound and not the way you've played it.

It is at most times good to run a bass through a compressor, and switch off the auto-gain feature if it has one and then tweek to find a good sound : Highish threshold longish attack no release lots of compression. This should give it some punch and some weight.

One thing that people get carried away with is turning up the bass too loud (forgive me if all this sounds patronizing, but I don't know how much you know). Turning up the bass is like turning down the treble and turning up the volume. I'm not saying "Don't turn up the bass!" I'm saying that you should use it in moderation.

If you want to make it more prominant, stick it through the distortion on your Digitech and use that tube to get an overdriven sound, not too harsh, but just so it starts to buzz, and then mix it in with the original signal so you don't lose that bassiness which gets cutoff dramatically with most analogue distorion.

Anyways I hope that helps
 
One of the main problems with bass is that the human ear is 'tuned' to hear mid sounds. As volumes decrease the bass is perceived to drop away very rapidly. (There is a name for this phenomenon can't remember what it is, but there's lots of literature about it out there. RobinH will know what it's called - nice to see you back here BTW Robin :hello: ). The most obvious solution to this is to boost the bass in your mix, but this can end up smothering it completely. Listening to a lot of bass in 'pro' recordings the thing I have noticed is how unbassy they are, really low mid sounds that you kind of 'know' are supposed to be bass - it's only when you turn up the volume that the real bass becomes apparent. Using eq and compression can help with this, here are some tips on eq that I use (experiment though, find out what works for your mix).

Is your bass boomy, taking everything over? Try pulling down some gain at around 50Hz.
Need more bass clarity, particularly at low volumes? Try boosting at about 400Hz.
To give that kind of 'middy' bass sound I was talking about earlier (the one that fools you that you are hearing bass) try boosting at about 800Hz.
To give even more 'cutting' power to your bass, boost at 1.5kHz - especially good for plucked bass sounds.

Some stuff to try out anyway. Good luck,
KasioRoks
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Originally posted by Marek Bereza
This KasioRoks guy really knows his stuff
Click to expand...
Thanks:D ... I hope RobinH answers, he really knows his stuff.
If you want to know more about eq-ing in general (or just about anything) check out www.studiocovers.com, they have tonnes of articles all about this stuff, from decent sources as well.

KasioRoks
 
My english syntax is good, my HTML (or whatever URLs count as), isn't. The comma at the end of my link messed it up, your one works fine.

KasioRoks
 
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