Bass Tone Help...

[Lustrum]

First post, hey dudes!

Im in the midst of recording my bands demo, were viking metal kinda thing, think Ensiferum or Equilibrium!

Now, guitars are fine (bugera one side Pod the other) Vocals are fine, Drums are fine (DKFH with drumagog replacing nearly everything!) and additional instruments are fine!

However, the bass sounds... a bit crap really.

We tried DI'ing straight into Pro Tools and using Sansamp PSA1, but the tone, even after compression etc is really flubby and loose, not what we want!
The only bass amp i own is a 15 watt Peavey thing, its currently at a friends house, but im assuming its not amazing when being mic'd up!

Finally, i tried using my POD (Its only a 2.0) with a few different models, but the EQ dosent give the...thump that i need!

Im looking for 2 tones, a gritty overdriven tone to cover the high end and a chunky subby kinda tone to bring out the lows, how can i achieve this with my current gear?

Im mic'ing amps with either an SM57, PG57 or AT2035
Any help would be awesome

Cheers dudes!!!

 

[FloridaRolf]

Welcome,

there are many threads about this, here are some I got in my favourites:

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1254353&page=1&pp=20
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/...ere-already-thread-recording-bass-guitar.html
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/production-tips/517848-bass-processing.html
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/production-tips/556975-bass-compression.html

Try feeding the search engine the next time.

 

[Joematthews]

Common trick, popularised on here by Ermz I believe.

Track bass through a DI and make sure the takes are tight, quantise and do what you want with it.

1) Duplicate bass into 3 or 4 tracks.
2) On track 1, run a low pass at aprox 200Hz or less. Compress the fuck out of this track.
3) On track 2, run a high pass at 200Hz and a low pass at around 1-2kHz or so. Lower the level of this track and compress it a bit but leave some dynamics in there.
4) On track 3, low pass at 800Hz or so and bust out an amp sim and impulse. Add a tiny bit of distortion but don't overdo it. Due to the inherant compressed nature of distortion you won't need much compression, if any on this track.
5) If you want more high end use the 4th track with a highpass set to bring the high end out.

I usually bus all these tracks together and compress/ eq them as needed. Of course this method and the frequencies specified will only work in certain situations, so this is only a rough guide.

Joe