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citrusburst 9 December 2007

Hey There,

I recently picked up a copy of the Bob Clearmountain Percussion and Bass sample library. In listening through the samples, I noticed that BC's electric bass is mixed stereo. It's a great sound - summing to mono significantly reduces the impact.

I've got a sense of what he's doing. The left channel is a fairly "normal" bass sound, while the right channel has a different equalization curve (the mids are eq'd pretty differently, in particular), is phase flipped, and delayed about 3ms.

My question is this: is there a standard approach that Bob Clearmountain (or others) use to mix an electric bass track in stereo? In other words, I can analyze the signal and see what's essentially "been done", but I'd like to understand why and how we got there.

Thanks in advance for any insights.

Best Regards,
Jed

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citrusburst Mon, 12/10/2007 - 00:24

Remy -

Thanks so much for the reply. I believe that Andy Wallace is known for using a similar unit - the SPX990 - for its "symphonic" effect to do his stereo bass spread.

I mix almost exclusively ITB, however, so I'm trying to find some good solutions to approximate approaches like the SPX90/990...

I know the "symphonic" effect is more-or-less a flanger, but, as I've used various software effects (Waves Metaflanger, etc), everything I've been able to generate has sounded distinctly like a bass-with-flanger, and not like that rich, excited Wallace/Clearmountain bass sound.

Any thoughts?

citrusburst Mon, 12/10/2007 - 00:53

Hey Again,

After some more tinkering with BC's samples, I discovered that Bob had hard panned the Amp signal left, and the DI signal right.

Now, for those of us using wonderful things like Ampeg SVX, we can in fact take a DI signal and run it through two separate hard-panned amps. Which sounds pretty rad.

Jed

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