51m0n

At what point in the history of the bass guitar do you see a period where the instrument was 'pure'? I find this very interesting, since to my mind historical recordings of bass a far from pure, they have massive distortion of the signal in them . The amps were overdriving like crazy (no where near enough power to handle the output asked of them without overdriving), the Motown studio 1 tube DIs were regularly overdriven quite deliberatley for instance, as were the console channels (all tube desks in there, sounded lovely, but not at all clean). At the SW mini bash the other weekend we had the pleasure of hearing a full on immaculate vintage Acoustic 360 rig with the 18" speaker cab, now that was massively loud, but also immensely distorted, it produced nothing to speak of over 1KHz, even though the bass in question did, and the amp was not even being pushed. Not my favourite kind of sound at all, but very popular in its day, since at least you could hear some bass with this rig. We went on to listen to an Ampeg from that era (dreadful), a Trace v4 into a Mesa 2x15 (nice warm but clear), some modern Ampeg (awful), some Markbass -> Barefaced (wow), Markbass -> Bergantino (my favourite still), Hartke -> Bergantino (damn fine), Eden (very very clean with GB basses, totally not with a P bass). Every single rig sounded different, and I tell you what if we had an ultra clean DI, and some humungous mastering suite rig with big monobloc amps and PCM monster monitors, that would have sounded completely different again, and would be arguably the least coloured of the lot. So what is your idea of pure bass, and when did you think it was not 'overprocessed'?

Well not entirely, you can try different strings, playing techniques (get lessons), different action, rooms, acoustic treatments, mic placement, mics, preamps, pickups, blends of mic/pickup, recording medium, post tracking fx (eq, comp, reverbs etc), masteringg chains etc etc etc. It all applies equally to db as electric. As soon as you introduce recording the medium and transducers that we have available to us mean that we have to make compromises in order to achieve the result we want, and by that token it is all a lie, a very beautifully crafted and ingenious lie, but a lie nonetheless.

Then you have to weigh up how much a warranty is worth to you ...

Define 'real bass guitar sound' for me....

[quote name='Beer of the Bass' timestamp='1323073081' post='1458804'] What sort of date would people say the whole mastering "loudness war" kicked in? Yesterday we had music TV channels on for an hour or so, and the difference in mastering style between newer stuff and 90s or older stuff was striking. All of the recent stuff was constantly loud and shiny and in-your-face in quite a wearing way. I view added harmonic distortion on bass as a separate issue from that, as I hear lightly driven bass sounds going back much further than the last couple of years, on records which have a lot of dynamic range. Most 70s prog is an example! I realise that a "natural sounding" recording is pretty much an impossibility and not particularly desirable anyway. Frank Zappa pointed out in an interview that since multitrack recording and close-micing came in, all recordings are an illusion, as there is no one place in the room you could put your head to hear the combination of sounds that end up on the recording. [/quote] Well I've seen a pdf of a typed memo regarding the issues with Beatles mixes and masters and trying to get as loud as their 7" singles were, from back in about '65, so its been going on forever. However with digital limiting techniques and even the use of deliberate digital clipping in order to push average gain higher it is getting so bad now that great music is being ruined. And I dont give a damn how many peoiple are used to the sound, it doesnt make it good!

No. It doesnt flatter the track at all, it merely makes it appear louder, but at the expense of transient power, punch, and dynamics. If you play a hard limited track on a system, and a/b it against the un limited original, but add the volume to make up for the processing, the unlimited track sounds better. Every time. But it isnt as loud when compared to the limited track if you dotn turn up the volume knob. I couldnt care less about the original performance, as I said there is virtually no such thing anyway on modern recordings, the amount of correctional work done at mixdown is unreal, groove is fixed, if not invented, pitch is corrected, transients are demolished or magiced out of mush, all of which is fine since all I care about is that the final production does the song justice, and crushing the life out of a track to less than 5dB of dynamic range as a part of the mastering process just destroys the musicality and power. IMO....

Strange this, the very best monitors are the flattest. Its the holy grail for sound engineers (well actually the flattest that work in the room). Now most people will talk about monitors therefore sounding bland and what have you. IME that is nonsense, care to take a guess at what they have in Abbey Road? B&W 800 series. These aren't even supposed to be monitors, but rather they very best hifi speakers you can buy (short of their Nautilus range). Probably at least as popular is the PMC range of massive transmission line monitors, now these are put forward as ultra accurate and are used by a very large number of mastering suites and mixing houses alike:- Now I guarantee that anyone here hearing their favourite music played back on systems with this quality of speaker would say the result was anything but bland. Its startling in that it will show up any flaw in the production. Its is unflattering in that regard, but the fact is it is the best possible representation of the music (or right up there with the best possible). Why did I draw attention to my sig earlier? Becaus every single thing you hear is not 'the truth' as in unprocessed, untouched, pure. It is all processed, by the amps, the tone controls the fx, the mic, the preamp, the recording medium. In the last 50 years no music has been released without colouration of any kind. All music that is played live that involves any kind of amplification is processed. It is, in fact, all a lie. The point is, that doesnt matter at all. If the end result conveys the emotion that the artist is attempting to convey then its all win. No amount of processing is too much, if you like it that way, and its a bonus if some other people do to. Where I personally think things have gone wrong in the last 15 years is the overreliance on brick wall limiting to increase the RMS compared to the peak level. Everything sounds louder, but has less impact and is more tiring, and less musical as a result. And who drives this? Record company execs who are afraid to be quieter than the competition, bands who dont know better, you cant blame the mastering engineers, they are paid to do a job for a client, the client demands the ludest thing ever, and the result is a track with no life, no punch, that is useless to listen to anywhere but in a car.

Three Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is superb...

Billy Sheehan did a great video years ago (if you can get your head past the dreadful hair and apalling interviewer) in which he really broke down his approach to tapping. He made it incredibly clear how he went about it. It is almost certainly on youtube somewhere...

Unfortunately for Bilbo his music area is not a studio, well, it is in that he records in it (as good a definition as any), but it would not enter into your top ten list of studios to visit before you die I think (your gaff is very high up on my list, just below Manifold and Bridge if I'm completely honest ) Which is his problem and why I really think a little work on the acoustic space and the mic position will pay more dividends than anything else in enabling him to capture a more direct source heavy sound. After all if the source sound isnt working no amount of kit will get it there (You can't polish a turd etc etc), and as the source in this case is heavily room influenced he needs to fix the room (at least from the mics perspective).

Read my sig.....

Jake asked what I meant by getting the room up to shape for tracking. You can still have massive control over the liveness/openness of the room, if you need a little more top end some brown paper imbetween the outer layer of nice cloth and the RW45 in the multiband absorption will bring back a lot of top end. Also you can simply cover some of the absorbers up with a sheet of ply if you want to make the room more live. Its about controlling the room in order to get the best recording, rather than having the room control your recording. At the other end of this spectrum is building a few gobos - 5 'x 4' x 3" frame, on good sized T-bar legs, double layer of (different thickness) gypsum on one side, fill the frame with rw45 and the nice breathable material over that - can be made to look really pro with some thought, and will hugely cut down reflections. you wouldnt need more than three, the gypsum side will provide a tight live feel (go to town and put a diffuser on that side if you like), the other side will absorb a lot. Wont sort out the bass like real trapping but if you arrange about three around the bass then you will really get a start on improving the sound. You can get superb ribbon mics for pants all money these days, invest in a Cascade Fathead II with a Lundahl transformer mod and you are golden, about £150 IIRC. Great mics, and absolutely awesoome on guitar, and vocal (esp dark sounding classic jazz vocals). They really do react very differently to a condensor, controlling the transients (they dont react fast enough to really bring the transients out, so are absolutely fantastic on very bright percussion signals too). Great mics, very very different from. Above all experiment with controling the room (duvets and heavy carpet gobos will do for now), and the mic position. It makes all the difference in the world Bilbo!

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1322851524' post='1456744'] A cheap(ish...) sound insulator can be made up of a couple of squares of ply, with four holes, one near each corner. A tennis ball (yes, old ones will do...) in each hole on the bottom square, the second square on top of that. The holes are there to stop the balls from rolling around. This gives a decent suspension, isolating the vibrations of the bass from the floor. Here's a pic of the version used for drumset insolation; reduce the size for just the bass, and you should be fine... [attachment=94352:Soun_Proo.jpg] ...Hope this helps... [/quote] Oh good call! Seen this done to suspend an entire studio floow (used alot more tennis balls, but same principle). Must be the cheapest reasonable means of getting a suspended floor.

Of course your best bet is to get one or two of [url="http://www.littlelabs.com/ibp.html"]these[/url] and track it right in the first place!

[url="http://www.voxengo.com/product/pha979/"]Voxengo PHA-979[/url] is available as a Mac AU but I dont think its free....

Not sure theres much to be gained with a LMIII, they were going to sort out the limiter to the power amp section, but apparently didnt in the end. I'd go with the LMII (assuming both a new)

Just a thought, and feel free to shoot me down in flames but how about an Auralex Gramma Pad? Just shorten your spike a wee bit and put it on top of that. Being the height it is I would imagine it would be a better barrier against direct transfer through the floor boards/joists than that thinner high mass flooring, it would probably be a cheaper outlay to try too.

Ha ha, that puts the compressor talk to shame, and I am no expert on acoustics, I've just read a fair bit about it, and tried some variations on the theme. I'll attempt a brief synopsis though:- Sound reflects off a surface much like light does off a mirror, different surfaces reflect different wavelengths of sound, and absorb others ( a bit like colours then). IN very very simple terms hard surfaces reflect high frequencies (and low frequencies), soft surfaces absorb high frequencies (but not low frequencies). The brain takes this reflected sound information and turns it into a very accurate model of the space in which the initial sound occured, where the sound is relative to us, the size of the space, the material bounding the space the number of boundaries to the space, the distaince of the source from the boundaires of the space etc etc. Standing waves in a room occur where the wavelength of a frequency matches the length of one of the rooms dimensions. The result is large peaks and nulls at that frequency as you move around in the room as the reflections from walls add or cancel each other - not good. The very worst type of room is a cube, but parallel walls are generally not good as they tend to create strong nodes (peaks & nulls). A parallel ceiling and floor is a source for standing waves too, unfortunately. Any kind of eqing for a room is doomed to fail as the room is the issue, it cant actually work anywhere but in the tiniest area of the room and should be disguarded as a solution to a difficult room, especially a room in which you intend to do any tracking at all. Absorption is where you try and turn acoustic energy into something else, heat usually, by impeding the acoustic wave in some way. Diffusion is where you take a reflection and scatter it so as to make the resultant reflections no longer appear to be from a single point. Bass trapping is absorption aimed at the lowest (and most difficult to control) frequencies and uses some ver special tools. So what does all this mean? You need to fool the brain into thinking the space you have is bigger than it is. To do this you need to create some broadband absorption to deal with that nasty slap back delay (the metallic ring you get if you stand in an empoty room and clap your hands). There are hundreds of examples of making a simple absorber on the web, you need some Rockwool RW45 or RW60, a good 4" to 6" thick and as big as you can (say 4' by 2' minimum), enough 2"x2" to make a frame, some cheap material you can blow through, and some nice material you can blow through. Make you frame and staple the cheap material to it. Put you nice material on the deck, put the RW on top, put the frame on top of that, cheap material against the RW. Pull the nice material up and staple it to the back of the frame all the way round, with a little compression of the RW and some careful folding you can get a nice looking result with no creases. Note the frame attaches to the wall and the RW is held off the wall by the thickness of the frame you made, this is important as absorbers like this work by slowing the movement of the air molecules, and if they are hard against the wall then they dotn work as well. Ideally they should be 4" to 6" off the wall. A simple rule of thumb, a third of your wall area can be covered in absorption like this. Staggering the absorption works well (so absorption mirrors wall. Then hang some off the ceiling (again maybe a third of the ceiling area covered) especially if your ceiling is less than 15ft tall. As a rule of thumb in a small room (ceiling less than 10ft, length less than 20ft, widht less than 15ft) you simply cannot have too much bass trapping. Bass is really hard to deal with, the deeper the bass the more difficult it is. The nature of acoustics mean that the corners where walls meet give you double the bass trapping effectiveness, and where the floor and walls meet you get another doubling. So corners are where you want your basstraos to be, a very simple and effective way to bass trap is to make a superchunk, whereby you cut triangles of RW45 and fill (literally) the corner of the room from floor to ceiling with RW, then put a frame up and stretch nice material over it to hide the truth. This works and is simple but requires a large amount of RW. ANother approach os to build two absorbers like the ones above, one 6" deep and one 4" deep and put them in the corner as follows:- [url="http://forum.studiotips.com/download/file.php?id=5184"]http://forum.studiot...ile.php?id=5184[/url] The trick here is to use less dense material for the filler (so nothing more than RW45, something equivalent to an RW30 would be fine). These are really effective for less material. Even thenther are cases wher you cant really get to grips with the lowest of the low, and at this point you need to investigate membrane absorption if you want to get really good results. Check out the BBC R&D pages there is a whitepaper in there that detials the building of a modular membrane absorber that takes out frequencies around 50 to 100Hz, and its basically a box made of ply, with a front of very thin ply filled with pink fluffy roof insulation. The dimensions of the box are super important as is its airtightness, but basically the low frequencies are spent trying to flex that ply membrane, and the result is a very thin (~6" deep) extremely effective bass trap. More time consuming than the other methods, but taking up less space in the room. Finally with all this absorption going on you are in danger of making the room lose a lot of top end, diffusion is one way to help move the top and around the room more evenly. It is a big topic though, there are various mathematically derived systems (2d, 1d, slats, etc etc) for diffusing the sound, its seriosly complex but putting a diffuser up imbetween each absorber can really help stopping a room get too dark sounding. Have a search oin gearslutz in [url="http://www.gearslutz.com/board/bass-traps-acoustic-panels-foam-etc/"]the acoustic forum[/url] some more detailed info. A good point to note is all this stuff needn't be guess work, for a small outlay you can get a measurement mic (£30 for a perfectly reasonable Behringer one) and using some free software you can measure what is happening in your room with regard to early reflections a frequency/decay time waterfall plots and really scientifically improve the space. In the meantime get some bass traps in there and some absorption on the walls!

You can hear plenty of room in that Jake, lovely bass, very strong "Puhh" at the attack of every note (esp in the lowest octave), then a nice warm round tone. I always find that buzz db's have really distracting, although it is a legitimate part of the sound and disappears in a mix. Treating that room a little with some basstrapping, broadband absorption and diffusion would make it sound great for tracking though. Not that its awful right now, just 'there' quite a bit.

Look for a Markbass sa450 second hand. Seriously light, but fills 2u nicely, perfect swap out, if anything it amy be a smidge louder than the LH500, but its vfery very close either way.

Possibly. As mentioned above there are a lot of factors in play here that we cant make absolute judgements without. Its worth a go though...

[quote name='Mykesbass' timestamp='1322650652' post='1453866'] Loved the look on the presenter's face when Brian May started playing Bohemian Rhapsody - genuine fan moment! [/quote] +1 that was just wicked wasn't it!

[quote name='jakesbass' timestamp='1322558034' post='1452432'] I have good ears which makes me happy and sad in equal measure, if there is a pick up in a recorded sound I can hear it, and HATE IT!!! I have a (3 actually) GT67 large diaphragm condenser, into a presonus firewire mic pre/interface into logic... (soon to be pro tools) I'll sort a soundcloud thingy later and give you some examples of my home recordings. I've done a couple of online sessions with it so I guess I'm doing something right. I'd be most interested to hear expert views on my setup and how to maximise it's usability I also have a couple of sm58s and a 57... and a gorgeous Alembic Pre for electric stuff. When I've played upright in studios, I encounter a variety of techniques, at AIR and strongroom the engineer uses a really lovely old Neumann, at Parr st in Liverpool the guy used a Neumann in front, a big ol ribbon mic in the distance and a thing that looked like a tapered pencil pointing at my fingerboard. At the Church in Crouch end it was one of these [url="http://www.korbyaudio.com/products.html"]http://www.korbyaudi...m/products.html[/url], at Angel in Islington a large Neumann condensor, and at Sleeper Studios he used a Neumann m149. I often think about selling my bass to get something louder... then I go into the studio and it just records so well... I've also done sessions in little jingle studios where I've been in a large vocal booth with a U87 and it sounded great despite the size of room restriction. [i]Bilbo, you know what your bass sounds like, and you know how you want it to sound coming back at you from monitors, as a novice engineer I would say experiment with positioning, if you can get someone else to play your bass and get on your hands and knees in front of it and with your ears find the place that it sounds most pleasing to you... mark the spot, and put the mic there, also mark the position of your bass. Keep trying mate.[/i] [/quote] I 100% agree that mic position is at least as important as everything else, a few inches, or a few degrees of rotation can really change the timbre of the sound you pick up. There are a million ways to skin this cat, as Jake points outy every studio he works in has a different plan to do exactly the same thing. Did that weird looking mic look like this Jake? If so its an Earthworks, and really rather spiffy! And Korby stuff makes me go "Ding, dong...."