51m0n

To do a simple recording of a song as a record of what your intent is is really simple and easy, and loads of fun. Plenty of good advice given, especially a nice decent simple interface and garageband for a start. I warn you now, you are on a very, very slippery slope.... Two of them in fact, one is downhill all the way, this is the dangerous one, it gets steeper, and ends in financial ruin, this stuff makes bass GAS look like wanting a cup of tea compared to heroin addiction, I kid you not. Bass gear is cheap, all of it, compared to top quality recording kit. My dream is to own Manifold Recording Studios, or a UK equivalent, can we say Euromillions? IMO the finest studio build the world has ever seen. Owned by the CEO of Redhat. The desks are works of art, and the machine room is frickin' incredible (sharks with lazerbeams bad-assery at work) let alone the acoustic control in the live rooms - I may have to go and have a lie down in a minute ;). Hell the entire complex is carbon neutral and has its own solar farm to power it! The other slope is the tricky one, where you are now it looks pretty much like a cliff face, and it too is very slippery, this is the learning curve. At first you think you know where the top is, and you can figure out with a lot of help a route there (again youtube videos are excellent ways to find out how to get there). However what looks like Mount Everest from the bottom turns out to be a pebble on the way to the summit once you get over it. This is normal, get used to it! There is a lot to learn, and a great deal of enjoyment to be had doing so, even for simple "4 track" style pre-production recordings of demos of new tunes for the band. Getting the most out of your simple interface a couple of cheaper mics will take you a while, getting the most out of garageband a fair while longer. Getting the most out of a full featured DAW? You never will quite, but you will get better and better, I hope you really get a kick out of it Glad there is another recordist on the forum!

Bingo....

With tube gear the plate voltage also makes a huge difference...

Valve/analogue/digal is a very poor and misleading spec to use. First valve is analogue, second many 'valve' compressors just have a valve preamp which is a very different thing to actual valve based compression which is properly called vari-mu. You would be better off with:- VCA Vari-mu Tube pre-amped VCA FET Optical Digital Just saying.... And yes it makes a real difference to the conpressor sound

Examples of the same bass line through each with a couple of variations ie low ratio 2:1 low threshold vs higher ratio 5:1 high threshold assorted attack release times would be awesome. Best of all in a mix! I realise this is probably not achievable but its actually the only thing that matters....

A lot of practice

Sorry old chap, may have read your post a little too rapidly

Thats fine, check out his bio, come back to me when you've worked with even 3 of the names on there

I am an expert here on compression, and I can categorically say that sometimes I cant hear it, out of the context of a mix. Because you just cant, not a 'transparent' compressor with a soft knee set to just pull everything up a couple of dB on the softer stuff especially in parallel. Good luck to anyone who can, you're definitely not normal. But put that in the context of a mix and if you know what to listen for you can hear the difference the compressor makes. So why bother if its that hard to consciously perceive? Because perception isn't conscious, psychoacoustics are hugely important and influential and definitely can make a band sound far more pro than the level of the venue they are playing in. Lets put it another way, would you rather an expert live engineer use everything at his disposal to make your band sound as brilliant as possible regardless of the venue, or would you prefer him to keep some of his tools in the box? Do you think your punters would tell the difference between Dave the drummer throwing some faders up on a shitty 6 channel Behringer desk and Wes 'The Wesernator' Maebe with a Midas Pro One and some choice outboard? What about Wes using the same desk as Dave and a few choice dynamics tools? I reckon Wes could make my band sound better live than I can with the same gear literally anywhere, he's the absolute canine undercarriage at his job, so I'd be some kind of an idiot if I didn't feel that. What does he use to achieve this? Simple, the basics that every sound engineer understands: good mic placement, good gain structure, good dynamics control, good spacial and additive effects, great musical understanding, great ears. He will use compression all over your bass to make it work in the mix better, think I'm kidding, check this out and especially this where he daisy chains two 1176s, the man is a master of compression, its his bread and butter. So what does this have to do with the OP question? Its simply the wrong question. It actually shows why most bassists probably shouldn't be trying to use compression, because it breaks down like this:- The audience should not generally be able to tell that a compressor is being used per se, but they will know that something is different if you turn it on and off. It depends on what the compression is for. A transparent gain riding compressor is going to work at a psychoacoustic level. On the other hand if you are using a compressor to drastically change the envelope of your bass sound then every single punter will hear the change as you swap it in and out. Its just a daft question really. Think like a bassist and you cant tell what its for, think like a sound engineer and you cant imagine a world without compressors on nearly everything.

If you are still saying you 100% don't need a compressor or anything that compresses your signal live and in some way people doing so are lesser players (still? really?) or kidding themselves, and you don't have an FOH engineer and a monitor engineer to do this for you, you almost certainly don't understand what compression actually does for the sound in the context of the mix both FOH and in your band-mates' monitors. Which is cool, but if you don't get that then you really are probably not best qualified to comment on whether they have a use live maybe?

And yes, live I use compression on my bass, the kick and snare, on the keys and synth, on the trumpet, bass trombone, tuba, on the guitar, on the congas, the bongos, jeez everywhere! I'm not out front when we are playing, I have to 'contain' the mix, so I mix out front minus the bass, get a great sound, then lay the bass down get a band member to double check the level, and bring a little bit into FOH if its not enough - I've never had to turn down live though. Without it the mix could drastically shift if someone hits a weird sound or as the band intensity rises through the evening, it would not be great. I have recorded our live shows many times, both multitracked and 2 track from out front to check the mix is good through the night with this system (initially channels were set up by doing a day long technical rehearsal with the whole band to get things sorted out, this has been revised many times since!). It holds together without an FOH guy really well, but we are pretty well rehearsed, and the other guys are superb musicians which is the most important thing (turd polishing is a misunderstood art lets face it).

Yo bro!

Is that a serious question??? OK so I've mixed at least hundreds of tracks on analogue and digital and who knows what gear. I have mastered probably more than I have mixed. I have mixed live bands I don't know how often, again analogue and digital. I have used compressors literally thousands of times, digital ones with groovy interfaces, digital ones with just the simplest graphics, analogue ones with multiple controls, analogues ones with odd names for the controls, analogue ones with bugger all controls too :), 'transparent' ones, 'character' ones, fast ones and slow ones. In the context I tried to use any of these devices:- Some of them sounded great. In that they did what I hoped they would do, and sometimes a bit more. Some of them sounded obvious. Which was sometimes great. Some of them were almost unnoticeable unless it was in the mix, in which case some of them I could just about notice, Which was great if that was what I wanted. All of them changed the sound of the track they were on in the context of the mix when they were set up how I wanted them to work, otherwise I wouldn't have used them. Where ever possible I would A/B test them at unity gain with the off signal in order to make that judgement call, its the only way to make the judgement as to whether or not the change is an improvement. So, yes, obviously, or I wouldn't use them ever, and neither would the other sound engineers who know their shizzle.....

Seriously, compression, again.... And not a single new point either, who'd have thought it. OP, search for a few recent compression threads, there is at least one where I bothered to spell out a bunch of reasons why compression isn't doing nothing even if you struggle to hear it in your bedroom, and also possible reasons you might want to use one in a pub, and a way to set one up such that it might help you etc etc Enjoy, I'll get me popcorn

My time is definitely not cheap. YMMV.

You cant get light, great, deep, loud and cheap. Its not about imaginative, its about realistic..... So he either compromises on one or more criteria or he saves up. Many years of bitter experience lead me to that conclusion, I am definitely not alone there :), best of luck breaking the rule.

You cant go cheap loud light and great at the same time. If you really need to deal with that deep a low end you need physically big too. I'd recommend a Barefaced Big Twin gen 3. Yes its what I've use, but I also have 2 FR800s and a Big Baby, and they are all amazing (even for the price), but for serious deepness you will not find a better cab than the Big Twin in my experience - truest low B I've heard and I have no doubt they will handle even deeper better than anything else. 2 Big Babies or 2 BFR800s gets really close though if you want that form factor. One of these days I'm going to run the whole lot up just to tilt the earth off its axis

I can't help it, being Grand Wizard of the Knights Martial comes with some baggage....

I use a rack compressor for some always on super transparent compression and limiting of any stupidness on my part. That being said if I wanted to add a compressor pedal then it would be purely to get a very obviously compressed tone (think sledgehammer or whatever) I would want it to be squishy and obvious. Personally I like optical compressors for this, and whilst the PC-2a is no doubt fabulous, I have had a bit of a thing for Joe Meek rack compressors of old. since we are talking pedals though I would add a Joe Meek Floor-Q to my board, I've used the Joe Meek OneQ in the studio as a bass preamp just because the compressor is so much fun, and this is the same compressor circuit. Its not subtle, probably carries a little noise but its got a super funky squish to it that I love for those moments when you just need the compressor to pump and grind on your tone

Well burn me at the stake, how did you guess?

Lucifer will have you by the bald in that case....

Single knob compressors are the work of Lucifer himself....

Yet to try it at war volume, need to borrow it from its real owner (eldest son) so I wont say anything other than it seems fine at practice volumes, and the eq seems very usable for general tone control, it is the opposite of surgical, which suits his needs perfectly.

Got one

I loathe audacity. Truly. Its such an outdated piece of software. Yet there are a couple of things I have used it for that nothing else will do (recovering files from corrupted SD Cards for instance). I use it for nothing else.