next on our list is bass very straight ahead there is a DI and then two
different amps and SVT in the basement and obviously Mike's a great bass player
and Chris is great recording engineer so there's not a lot going on here they
were being collected into a mono output on the session they sent me so I'm
collecting into a mono aux there's a Decapitator for a little bit of color
there is a fatso and this is because I got a session to mix once and someone to
put a fatso on the base and it sounded really cool and I just saved their
settings I don't even remember who it was it sounded cool so every once in a
while and I'm not sure what I want to do with the base I'll just pull that up and
then there's an EQ which is something I use quite often on bass and guitars
it's a Helios model and UAD has one wave sized one I've been using the waves one
lately and adding either 700 or 1k on the bass is just the presence as well as
using the 60 Hertz circuit of the Helios and this particular makes I'm actually
adding one DB of it normally that can just sit at zero as soon as you switch
it in there's resonance and it's just because of the way the filter circuit is
built you have some sort of feedback in the crossover I don't know exactly what
the topology is but it will resonate at around the frequency that it's set to so
this can add a lot of really cool low end to the bass so I'm going to play you
the bass tracks individually with everything still on and then we'll go
through what I'm doing overall here's a DI just adding a bunch of presents to
that and that's not because I think that it sounds better with that what it is is
I'm using that di track to get the sort of intimate part of the bass M which is
the sound of the strings themselves as opposed to the Thundering bass tone that
is the rest of it then here's the first of the amps
and here's the basement a little bit dirtier and obviously added together
those two amps are just going to fill out the low end because the low end is
going to be completely in phase but the mid-range would be a little bit
different so we're going to get more low end a little more solid it will also
even out this particular base track is pretty even note to note but just having
two recordings of it will even it out because the notes that are quiet unless
it's the base itself aren't going to be the same amount quiet in every amplifier
every microphone adding the DI back into that you start to get more definition
and that definition sort of acts like aggression the more you can hear the
attack of the note the more aggressive the bass will sound sometimes especially
while recording there people have seen who feel as though the more distorted
something gets the bigger and more aggressive it will sound and the reality
is the more distorted something gets the less attack it will have and it can
quite often get less aggressive and especially in the track you start to
lose all of the rhythmic element which is where the energy and aggression will
come from from something like that so it's actually sort of a cleaner base
than you might expect on this track but it will pick up distortion from the
guitars in a way so it's much more important that you can hear exactly what
it's doing and it's the driving pick on the strings that's making it happen now
that we've got all three tracks in I will show you what's going on with these
overall plugins so the Decapitator
you
pretty subtle just a little bit of drive on there that is then followed by the
fatso
it actually has the feel of parallel compression to me so it's bringing the
low-mids to the forefront and it's really evening everything out and then
last but not least the EQ
what's interesting to me about this and it's why I love this particular EQ but
just EQ in general to me this makes the biggest difference to the bass and it
obviously sounds very different with the fatso but the fatso is just making it a
bit more of what it already is this little bit of EQ at 700 Hertz and
then the resonance at 60 is turning it into a really exciting bass sound as
opposed to just a really good bass sound of an exciting performance so check that
out again
there you go EQ is much more than just frequency shaping it can really change
the character of stuff and that happens on the toms it can happen on anything
really but they think it's really apparent there and then this is getting
sent off to the rear bus