Here's a little example of what you want your bass guitar recording to sound like. Along with your drums. Along with their guitars. Along with your keyboards.
In this particular recording I made, you are listening to pure all transistor, vintage Neve. Gained up slightly on the high side, on the bass guitar. A little 1176 with a relatively slow attack time and modest release time, was dialed in. A little high pass filtering. Very little rise in the midrange. And otherwise, that's it.
The drums had my favorite microphones on them which were mostly Sennheiser 421 on the tom-toms. 57 on snare. 112 on kick. AKG C-451, with pads screwed on to the capsule, on hat, SM-81 on overheads. Snare and kick both have a dose of EQ, limiting from 1176's and followed by the KEPEX-1, noise gate on all the drums. But not the overheads. And very little EQ was used other than plenty of high pass filtering.
While this was a multitrack live for video & FM production, this is the live, fly by the seat of your pants, never engineering the group before, mix. I had only played Earl KLUGH, on the radio. So I was rather happy to find out, hours earlier, that he was part of this all day, 20,000+ attendee, jazz festival. His guitar is on a wireless. So was the saxophone. There are two keyboard players with four keyboards. All of which feeds were mono. So they're getting copious amounts of Yamaha SPX 90 & ALESIS Quadra Verb effects processor, to spread them out a bit. And while I have the 24 track digital master safety backups, I have felt no need to remix nothin'. I like my own engineering just the way it is.
There is something very special about this type of live engineering. In a sense, you are a member of the band. You're playing your console, with the band. The mental hook up and synergy, can't be beat. And you can't repeat it on a mix down. This is what it is, the way it's supposed to be. Just like this. Just that easy. Just that fast. Just that fun.
So enjoy this:
https://soundcloud.com/remyrad%2Ftrack08
[="https://soundcloud.com/remyrad/track08"]View: https://soundcloud.com/remyrad/track08[/]
And any others you find under RemyRAD and only RemyRAD. Not to be confused with "
RemyRedd" . Who's someone else not me. There is a description of the production of each cut. Which might be of some value to you? And which most of the time I will generally include a little light 1176, limiting, on the bass guitar. And not much else. High pass filtering is important unless you like a lot of mud?
I think you'll also find the bass guitar sounds equally good, whether it's coming out of a pair of 1 inch diameter laptop speakers, compact near field monitors, or, big JBL's. And when you can hear that instrument on all of those speakers both large and small? You know you're in the pocket. And it doesn't take much to get that. The less you do, the better it is. And of course this guy is playing one hell of an incredible 6 string bass of which I know not what brand? But what an awesome sound! This is from the DI and only the DI, whatever which, the PA company plugged in. Or maybe it was just from the XLR output on the back of his amplifier head? I had no way of knowing? I simply had a rundown that indicated bass guitar would be on input 12. As was the other microphones and input sources.
This was an outdoor concert with a fairly stiff breeze. So lots of high pass filter was used. Whatever acoustics you hear? Are all fake. All from inexpensive affordable digital effects processors like Lexicon PCM-60, ALESIS Quadra Verb, Yamaha SPX 90 and a couple of Delta Labs EffectTron 2 1024's. All of this is in real time. All of this is old refurbished vintage equipment. No software was used in the production. It was merely transferred to the computer via a cheap USB digital audio interface, via STDIF from the DAT. There is no mastering. No mastering at all. This is how it's done. This is what real audio engineering is all about. It's not about software nor plug-ins. It's also not about necessarily what DI box you use? Sometimes you just take what you can get and roll with it. That's what this is. This is not the PA. This is simply a split of the microphones on stage to be able to go to me, the stage monitor mixer and the front of house system and mixer engineers. So each microphone is going to three separate places, each and every one of them. Kind of like an old-fashioned telephone partyline only better.
Don't over think recording bass guitar.
Mx. Remy Ann David