Bass Recording Process

The most common was of recording bass is to either completely DI the bass or DI and mic it at the same time. DI-ing essentially means recording the signal straight from the amp or bass and not through the speakers. We chose to do neither. We decided to only use the microphone as our bassist has a very distinct, fuzzy tone. We wanted to get the heavy mids out of the speaker of the amp to accentuate his tone and make sure it was perfectly fuzzy and distorted. For information on how the bass rig and microphones were set up, see the gear tab under the Bass Recording Process tab. Below is an example of how we wanted the bass to sound on the EP:

Other than this, recording the bass was a very simple process. Cain, our bassist, plugged in his bass and played along to my drum takes while recording them into logic. We only did a total of three takes for each song as that was all we needed. The bass parts for the two songs on the EP arent overly complicated and therefore Cain recorded them accuratley and quickly. We were however, on a time limit as we needed to be out of the studio by 6 o’clock, and Cain couldnt attend the session the next day so it was of upmost importance that we got the bass tracks done there and then. We successfully recorded the bass tracks with minimal effort. This was the end of the first day of recording and judjing by what we managed to acomplish, a success.