Bass sub/grit/disto tracks

[Heabow]

Hey!

Mixing bass guitars is always a quest for me and I think for many. I've shaped great tones IMO as well as shitty sounding bass, that's something I'm not very good at. My personal taste is a good distorted tone for most metal genres but of course some projects need a totally different approach. Even if I got some good tones with only one track, most of the time I duplicate the DI track to work on every aspect of the tone. Common technique for us all.

Anyway, my usual issue is to find the right tone for each track. I'd be very curious to hear your different tracks soloed. Sub track, grit track and distortion track. I think it could be a great help to understand how things work together. We talk about your personal approach. I'd be very grateful if you share some clips.

Thanks!

 

[Arsenu,]

Ermz's mixing guide bass chapter is a great read on that subject

 

[UMF]

Ermz's mixing guide bass chapter is a great read on that subject

+1 on that

 

[Heabow]

Yes I bought it. I'd just like to hear different ways to do it, more than read.

 

[AntonioPetrole]

Just do a lot of experimenting. Ermz' book is great to learn the idea, but there is 1,000 ways to do it. He just has a good starting point. Personally I don't like the DI for sub bass, I usually duplicate my Sansamp signal between clank and sub bass

 

[He's Dead, Jim]

I find that most of the variation you get in the multi-track method is in the high-pass and low-pass filters and slopes and where/how much compression and EQ you use. A HPF on the sub track at 300 is hugely different from a HPF at 200, and a HPF on the clank track at 300 brings in some nice harmonic content to fill out the track, but can also get messy too quickly. For compression, I don't really like using bass bus compression because the distorted tracks have almost no dynamic range once they've been through a sansamp or 5150 and HPF'd, so I only use compression on the sub track.

 

[Gaclav]

I've spend some time on KSE InDueTime from Jotun, and he recorded some insanely good DI, anyways after I closed mixing, I started to play with this track. Here is the result (first half is clean, second is after processing):

I think that this is good practice material, I'm sure I'll want to dig it more as soon as I'll have more free time.

 

[Habsburgs]

Those KSE DIs are really good! Trying to get a really nasty clanky sound