Recording Bass Guitar

This time I thought we’d take a brief look at the basics of capturing a good bass guitar sound.  To do that we should first define what we’re aiming for.  Although you may apply EQ and other methods during mixdown in order to sculpt the bass sound properly for the style of the song,  it sure does help to begin with a good recording of the instrument first.

When I track bass guitar I like to have a good, fundamental tone that provides a solid low-end to the song I’m working on.  I also like the bass to have nice clarity to the attack so that the articulation of the bass part can come through the mix if desired.  You can achieve some great results by simply going direct (DI) with the bass signal via a good preamp or modeling unit but sometimes it’s nice to have the thump and moving air of a real cabinet along with it.  We’re going to look at capturing a mic’d bass cabinet along with a direct line on two separate tracks.

To capture the tone of the bass cabinet, make sure the cab is steady and placed so that it’s not vibrating on the floor.  Now would be a good time to make sure the speaker grill is secure as well since the vibrations might easily be picked up by the microphone.  I tend to use a mic like the AKGD112 or EV RE20 on bass speakers.  Place the mic several inches off the speaker and then use headphones while playing to determine how much of an angle to use in pointing the mic to the speaker.  I like to point the mic about at the edge of the center cone and 8-12” away.  Once you’ve got a good signal from the mic’d cabinet you can take a second feed via an A/B box or perhaps the direct out of the amplifier and run that into the mixing board, a good preamp or modeler.  This second signal will be the direct sound.  The goal here is to blend the two sounds to taste during mixing.  You will likely need to make sure the two signals (mic’d cabinet and direct line) are in phase with each other.  Chances are that the DI signal will arrive slightly ahead of the mic’d signal.  In a DAW this is easily done by zooming in on the waveforms of each track and aligning the mic’d track to the DI track.  Another method is to place a delay on the DI track and adjust until the tracks are locked with each other.

Having these two tracks available when you mix a song gives you some nice options for the sound of the bass.  Want more liveliness to the sound?  Dial in more of the cabinet tone.  More articulation and clarity?  Try more of the DI signal.  Try using a high-pass filter on the cabinet track and a low-pass filter on the DI signal so that one track provides the clarity and the other more of the low-end punch.  Add some distortion to one signal and balance it with the clean tone of the other. 

There are lots of possibilities with this method so as always, experimentation is key and your ears will tell you when you’ve hit on the right combination.