Recording bass guitar - the basics - GuitarTalk Community

doc-phil · 2009-09-21T14:18:06+00:00

For the last year or so I have been getting to grips with recording my own compositions, but I've restricted myself to pretty much only recording drums and g...

Recording bass guitar - the basics

doc-phil

Alan Ratcliffe wrote: That sounds like you're recording your guitars with too much low end to compensate for not having bass. When you add bass, the bass and the guitar sounds "mask" (blend together).

I think that is exactly what is happening. When I'm using Gearbox I generally crank the bass up on the amp model. How do I apply the filters though? Do I do it after I've recorded a guitar part in my DAW or am I supposed to do it within my amp sim? I'm not sure how I would do it in Gearbox except for maybe fiddling with the EQ :-\

Alan Ratcliffe wrote: Also make sure that your bass parts are in the right register - if they are playing in the same register as the guitars, try dropping the bass part down an octave where it belongs and it'll find it's own sonic space in the mix.

In most of my compositions my guitar is tuned to drop C, and while experimenting with bass guitar I've tuned it like this: C G C F. Are you suggesting I tune down further than that?
I'll mess around with the plug-in using your advice and see what I come up with ? Thanks.

AlanRatcliffe

doc-phil wrote: How do I apply the filters though? Do I do it after I've recorded a guitar part in my DAW or am I supposed to do it within my amp sim? I'm not sure how I would do it in Gearbox except for maybe fiddling with the EQ :-\

Low- and high-pass filters are types of EQ. It depends on your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation - "recording software" in English) though. The VSTi (instrument) has an audio output and your DAW should allow you to EQ the output or even use an EQ VST on that. RTM time, I'm afraid...

In most of my compositions my guitar is tuned to drop C, and while experimenting with bass guitar I've tuned it like this: C G C F. Are you suggesting I tune down further than that?

No. That should be OK. What I'm saying is make sure that the bass is playing the C an octave below the guitar's C.

doc-phil

Oh I see... I went searching through the plug-ins that came with Mackie Tracktion and there is a Low/High-pass filter. I assigned one to each guitar track and the bass track. I set the highpass filter at 220Hz for the rhythm tracks and 200Hz for the leads. I can hear a noticeable difference.

I set a lowpass filter at 200Hz on the bass, I couldn't really hear much difference but that could be due to my untrained ear. Overall it does sound considerably better, the guitars have less of a 'whoosh' sound and I can hear the bass, but without it masking the guitars.

Thanks for the advice ?

Gearhead

Just like me to contradict the resident guru, but I think if you don't hear any difference between filtered bass and the way it was, you might actually not have enough highs added to the bass - (as long as you're not playing entirely unisolo) the harmonics on the bass help the listener hear when there's bass notes being played.

In general guitars will sound less heavy when there's other instruments being played. For instance a lot of Queen stuff actually has very overdriven guitar parts but does not sound like hard rock, because there is piano and bass mixed in to such and extent that you don't hear so much Brian.
Listening to Metallica I get the impression they put a notch filter on the distorted guitar parts, only using one octave each. So for example guitar one 200-400Hz and two 400-800 Hz. You do hear the other frequencies of the guitars but about 4-6dB down.
Hope it makes sense...

PS might also be you monitoring - what speakers do you use?

andrewjbryson

Doc Phil :

There is a nifty VST plugin I use , its called Ampeg Bass

It basically has a lot of Bass Amp presets (all the popular / historic ones)

This will add a lot of shape/gain/drive to your programmed Bass guitar.

But once again... the correct E.Q'ing and compression needed to make it work in a mix.

AlanRatcliffe

@Gearhead - No problem. I myself usually leave the lowpass filter off the bass or set the cutoff frequency quite high, I mentioned it's use because especially with heavier music it's easier to dial in than using more complex EQing.

If anyone wants to experiment with a parametric EQ, try the following:
+/-40Hz - high-pass filter here can help clean up the bass and save a lot of amp energy that can't be reproduced by most speaker systems (which in turn means you can turn up the level of the bass a bit more)
+/-100Hz - boost to dial in some fatness (maybe down as low as 60Hz with heavy downtuned stuff)
+/-2.5KHz - boosts here bring out pick attack and "bite", and make the bass stand out better without adding too much energy.

Aside from high and low-pass filters (which have a fixed rolloff) or for special effect, EQing should almost always be fairly lightly - adjustments of more than 3dB should not be needed in most cases and by the time you hit more than 6dBs, it should tell you that there is something else wrong.

@ Andrew - I also use the IK Multemedia Ampeg SVX or the Ampeg in Guitar Rig. Wonderful for adding thickness to bass tracks or adding some realism to a softsynth bass. Ampegs rule for recording!

majestikc

A bass guitar's low E tuned to standard tuning is 41hz, a guitar's is 82hz (an octave above), so filtering off below 100hz is chopping away most of the fundamental frequency of those instruments, maybe filter off the bass guitar at 35hz and the guitar at 65hz.

Don't be afraid to make it rumble either, a problem I have with so many recordings these days (especially metal) is that they have absolutely NO low end and way too much ear-raping high end fuzziness.
It's just my preference, but I would rather go with more low end than high end, it's more enjoyable.

majestikc

Also remember that you can't boost what you don't have, if you want a nice bright smooth top end, you have to capture it, if you want a rock solid low end, you have to capture it, meaning your sound and playing before you even hit record should already be almost what your looking for.

doc-phil

Gearhead wrote: PS might also be you monitoring - what speakers do you use?

My speakers are just these tiny little computer speakers that I bought as a part of a 5.1 surround sound thing for my pc... I know they're pretty useless in terms of recording, but I don't have cash to buy proper ones, I'm still trying to scrape money together for toontrack ezdrummer and DFH ?

andrewjbryson wrote: There is a nifty VST plugin I use , its called Ampeg Bass

I'll look into that, I hope its free though! ?

I changed the lowpass filter on the bass from 200 to 135Hz, and at one stage I accidentally made it a highpass filter and I can definitely hear a difference between the bass with the different filters on. With the lowpass filter it seems a lot more 'bassy' whereas otherwise the bass tracks seem to have a bit more 'click' to them.

EDIT: I just went to the IK multimedia site; Ampeg is certainly not free ☹ ? it's a cool $230! But in any case, I couldn't use it as I don't even have a bass guitar. To get my bass tracks I tab it out in Guitar Pro, then import the midi into fruity loops and apply that free bass vst I have to the midi track, then export as an mp3 from there.

majestikc

Check out: http://www.acmebargig.com/

They have a load of free guitar amp simulators and a pretty good bass amp simulator, haven't really messed around with them too much, but I tried the one through a free cab impulse response and it actually sounded pretty good, as good as anything in guitar rig at least, they have audio demo's up as well.

And they look good..........and..........they're FREE, plus they have a delay and flanger plugin as well.

doc-phil

I can't believe all that stuff is free! I downloaded the Canadian Metal Pack, it looks quite interesting. It'll take a while for me to dial in some decent presets but it certainly looks promising ?

majestikc

Did you listen to the demo of that C-15 (playing a megadeath song I think)?

They're just head emulations, you'll need to get some cabinet impulses, they do have a cabinet impulse loader though, and there "friends of acmebargig" link has a link to ReCabinet which has a selection of impulse responses as well that you can try/use, plus there's loads of great free impulses floating around the web.

Also that Nick Crow Lab 5150 head looks good, couldn't try it out, my cpu is only SSE1 and it needs SSE2 to run.

majestikc

......it's that old!

An AMD Athlon XP2200+ 8) (old skool kool)

doc-phil

Haha no I didn't listen to the demo using the C-15, I'll go back and have a listen.

Maybe its time for an upgrade of the pc... it can co-incide with the release of Windows 7 ?