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Favourite Bass For Recording?


Rubbersoul
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Does anyone find that they either use a completely different bass for recording or that they change the control settings on their regular bass? I play an Ibanez GSR 200 and live I use the P pickup exclusively with the tone on full and the active EQ boost all the way up. When recording however I find I get a much clearer tone if I turn the active EQ off and turn the J pickup up full. Just curious to know what if any changes you make from your live settings to your recorded ones.

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I always record DI + amp and blend them. As JapanAxe said whatever bass the track requires will be used. In my case these are Wal 5strings (fretted or fretless) or Fender Jazz and Precisions. My recording amps all are vintage tube amps and cabs which I don´t carry with me for gigs. They are too heavy and expensive for gigs and have low wattage. Some of them being unreliable due to age as a bonus :-( That´s not exactly what I want to gig with. That means that my settings for recording are always different from gigs.

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Honestly it´s not difficult to mic a bassamp but you need a properly designed recording space and a good idea how to do it.
I usually place my basscabs with their rear directly at the basstraps of the room. These will absorb the lowend radiated to the back. That way it will prevent reflections from that wall interfering with the cab´s signal. It´s necessary because the mic not only points to the amp but to the wall behind it, too. It would pick up reflections from there as well as the wanted signal. Without basstrap there´d be combfiltering going on leading to a very uneven lowend response.
Then I place two boxes of absorptive foam around the cab. They will eat up a lot of the energy radiated from the cab into the room, reducing spill into other mics (drums, roommics, etc..). And they prevent spill from other signals into the bassmic. The third measure is to place the cab as far away from other room-boundaries which in my room is easy because it´s huge (>200sqm, 6m heighth). In small rooms you need to have a lot of lowfrequency absorption going on to control roommodes.

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Gibson SG bass > VT Deluxe > Focusurite or whatever. Just seems to record well, A touch of post recording compression and then is good to go for what I want. For the thing with two more strings I have found the Joyo American Sound direct to interface very good (quicker to get good results than Sansamp TriAC). With this setup we can quickly get reasonable (for our purposes) recordings virtually anywhere (that we can fit in).

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I tend to prefer using an active bass (in my case a Stingray) via a DI box - this one, the [url="http://www.radialeng.com/jdi.php"]Radial JDI[/url].

I was sceptical about the Radial at first and it's not cheap (I was lucky to get mine on 50% discount), but it makes an audible improvement to my recordings. And it's a passive unit, using a big ol' chunky Jensen transformer, which is nice :)

I'm also in the process of setting up a chain for [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-amp"]re-amping[/url], where I'm planning to record my bass DI and then 're-amp' the signal through my small combo, record that with a mic, and then mix the two signals together (or flavour with other re-amped signals if I'm messing around with FX). It's quite faffy, but the results I've heard from others who go down the re-amping route have been very good. And it seems like a nice - and cheap - method of getting some analogue processing in the mix.

PS: I also tend to record with my bass pots/controls set flat and then make adjustments after the recording - [i]with the exception of[/i] pickup blend, which I set first and record 'wet'. This is simply so that I can make adjustments to the tone at any time, especially in response to other changes to the overall mix.

Edited by Skol303
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[quote name='Rubbersoul' timestamp='1485204246' post='3222130']
Does the DI box run into an interface or straight to your computer?
[/quote]

Into an interface. The Radial JDI box is an instrument-level line in (1/4" jack cable direct from my bass) and a microphone level out (XLR). So the mic output gets plugged into my interface using a standard mic cable.

It's also an ideal way of DI'ing a bass into a PA system, but I haven't tried that myself as I don't currently gig.

Radial do a whole bunch of different DI boxes for specific applications, including 48V powered boxes that are supposedly better for use with passive instruments. All made in Canada and certainly 'road ready' - the DI box I have is built like a small, pedal-sized tank :)

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I find more often than not the producer/recording engineers in studio's prefer a passive bass to an active one
and lately there is a lot of love for my fender p which records lovely, my jazz'z are active/passive and invariably
i use them passive too where as live i might use them active more.
I also find the heavy ash body jazz or p are favoured for recording ,where as live i,m far more likely to opt for the lighter
weight active bass's.
I think there is more clarity and a crispness to the heavy ash body passive p or j bass.

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Strange thing. I've been using the ibanez for everything since I got it and as a live workhorse it's excellent but for recording not so much. Decided to try my ancient, battered and burnt Westone tonight and it is actually brilliant for recording . The ibanez has a clanky upper register I can't get rid of whereas the Westone is just warm and lovely. Here's a link to the burning thread if you're interested.
http://basschat.co.uk/topic/283829-massacre-of-innocents-westone-concorde/page__pid__3039821#entry3039821

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