Brief Summary

At its simplest bass guitar is the easiest of instruments to record. Literally plug and play. However, if you want a more satisfying sound here are some guidelines and principles to follow.

Going Deeper

Continuing our Start Here series we move to bass, Specifically bass guitar. Often the butt of nearly as many jokes as the drummer, the bass player has a uniquely influential position in an arrangement, forming the link between the drums and guitar and keyboards. The audience might be watching the singer and guitarist but they are dancing to the bass! 

Beyond the role basslines play in creating the rhythmic foundation and groove of a song, another, less spoken about aspect of a bassline is its role in creation the harmonic structure of a piece of music. If the rest of the band are playing C major and the bassist plays A, the band are now playing Am7. No-one else can do that!

While upright basses, synths, pianos and organs are all excellent ways to provide the bottom end, in this article we’ll focus on the bass guitar, an instrument which has remained largely unchanged since it appeared courtesy of Leo Fender in the 50s. 

Recording bass can be as simple as plugging a bass guitar into an instrument input on your interface, setting the gain (leave plenty of headroom) and hitting record. It works, it sounds good, captures the entire range of the instrument and many, many excellent basslines have been recorded via simple Direct Injection (the ‘DI’ in DI box). There are however a few things to consider here beyond the instrument being fully functional, in tune and properly intonated.

Noise

While basses with humbuckers and active pickups are commonplace, the overwhelming majority of bass guitars are vintage designs - Passive and with single coil pickups. The venerable Fender Precision and Jazz designs are prone to this and are so ubiquitous that you’re very likely to be dealing with a bass which is vulnerable to noise and interference. Fixing it at source is always better than trying to sort it out later so if you hear buzz, try to figure out where it’s coming from. If it’s a harsh 50 or 60Hz buzz it’s mains interference. It could be an earth loop, it could be cable interference. Does it stop when you touch a metal part of the guitar? If you have an earth lift on a DI box try using it. Switch the lights off to see if it’s them. Turn the guitar to see if that helps. Change the mains socket you’re using. Fixing buzz is a big subject but if you have buzz, don’t try to fix it in the mix.

Impedance

Lots of DI inputs on interfaces have a choice of impedance settings. Try them when you’re setting up. Passive and single coil guitars are more susceptible to the effect of impedance than most sources so audition them. You’ll hear a tonal shift, though depending on the bass the effect might be subtle. Choose whichever you prefer.

“Clacks”

Something lots of bass players who are unused to recording often find is that they punctuate their live playing with taps and slaps on the strings, particularly when muting notes. This is rarely a problem when playing live but under the microscope of a DI recording it can be more of an issue. This is usually an unconscious aspect of the player’s technique and there often aren’t any quick fixes but this kind of clacking can cause havoc when compression is used. Trying to minimise it at the tracking stage is always the best solution but do bear in mind that context is everything and bass guitars create all sorts of mechanical noise which is part of the performance and, in context, is usually fine.

Amplifier/Amp Modelling

Unlike electric guitars, where a DI sound is relatively uncommon,  a DI bass is a standard sound and can provide all you need. However a bass amplifier can add character to what can otherwise be a rather sterile sound. Far and away the most famous bass amp is the mighty Ampeg SVT. I was unlucky enough to do the sound on a tour which used 5 of these beasts. They are unbelievably heavy! While actually quite flexible, this amp is revered for its rock tone, replete with gnashing overdrive and huge bottom end. Distortion is cool on bass and is something we’ll return to but the principal effects of bass amps is to introduce some cabinet colouration and to ‘round off the edges’ off the tone. The heavy cones of bass amp speakers don’t reproduce the top end very well and this natural low pass filtering is a lot of the reason I favour bass amp tones. If you aren’t planning on using a DI track as part of your recording you might consider taking one as an aid for editing, as described in our tip article for electric guitars, and of course a DI is always handy as an option if you later decide to re-amp.

When miking up a bass amp, unless you’re running a very distorted tone you don’t need to mic up as close as is typical on a guitar amp. Mic choice is very much whatever sounds good. Condensers can be excellent and dynamics work beautifully. I’d avoid ribbons though.

While I’d always prefer to mic up a real amp, amp modelling plugins of classic bass amps are available and you probably have at least a couple in your DAW. If you don’t then consider trying a guitar amp model, probably with a 4x12 cabinet, along with a DI to add colour. Run it pretty clean and experiment with the mic alternatives.

An important point here is that the thing which will make much more difference to the results than mic choice is what happens if you combine an amp tone with a DI recording, which many people do.

Phase and Comb Filtering

If you are tracking through an DI and an amplifier you will need to pay attention to phase and time alignment. Whenever you have the same sound more than once in a recording and that sound is taking different routes into your recording the likelihood is that they will be out of time relative to each other. In the case of a DI and a microphone you’ll have electrons moving in the pickup coil which goes via the guitar lead into the DI, effectively at the speed of light. The microphone is picking up the sound through the air, at the speed of sound. Although it hasn’t travelled far, it’s still enough for it to be a little late compared to the DI. When these sounds are combined in your DAW they will create a (usually undesirable) change in timbre. Colloquially they are referred to as sounding ‘phasey’. These relative offsets can be manually corrected by moving one signal in time with the other in the DAW but the simplest way to fix it is using a plugin which measures and corrects it for you. The best known of these is Sound Radix’s excellent Auto Align.

Processing

Like everything in recording a good tone starts at the instrument and player. But what about processing? The main advice we’d give is that, unlike most instruments where overcompression is undesirable, bass tolerates compression well and what would be overcompression on a vocal, acoustic guitar or piano would probably be fine on bass. Compression helps even out the response of bass guitars, which can suffer from dead spots on the neck, and healthy amounts of compression extends sustain. A long attack will let the transient through giving a more percussive sound. Beware of release times which are too short as they can lead to distortion. If you have an Opto compression plugin it’s hard to get bass wrong so if you’re not confident with compression start with an LA2a style compressor.

In the video below we see an excellent example of use of saturation and optical compression on bass courtesey of Paul Drew.

EQ

As for EQ, avoid the temptation to boost the bass as a matter of course. The bottom end is important but there might well be plenty there already. Listen and judge for yourself. Check on headphones if you don’t trust your monitoring. It’s important to consider the relative roles of the bass and the kick drum in your mix as if you try to make everything huge and bassy, you’ll probably find things get messy.

The fundamental of a low E on a 4 string bass is about 41Hz so be aware of what you might be boosting if you use a low shelf EQ. Midrange is sometimes overlooked on bass. Fullness and body are higher up the spectrum than you might think. Pull up a little 200Hz and see what’s there, now try 600 for some ‘honk’, what about 1KHz? Always do this in context with the rest of the mix and you’ll find that a bass tone which sounds impressive on its own often isn’t the same as a tone which sounds good in the mix.

Distortion

Distortion gets a special mention because distortion adds harmonics to sounds and this can really help the audibility of bass on bass-challenged playback systems. While you might think you don’t want a distorted bass sound, even on a clean bass part you can use a surprising amount of saturation before the sound becomes noticeably distorted. What you’ll probably hear is a richer bass which is easier to hear and as a result might be able to be pulled back a couple of dB. Adding a little bit of ‘hair’ to a bass sound can work wonders.

Tuning

Being monophonic, bass is very suitable for manipulation with tuning plugins. Intonation can be an issue with bass and if a note is pulling too much it’s a straightforward fix using any of the big name tuning products. Fretless and upright bass is a case where this might be particularly useful. For some engineers tuning fretted bass is a matter of course, others rarely feel the need.

Bass is fairly straightforward to record. Keeping it simple is usually a good idea but be aware that your monitoring is going to be least accurate at the bottom end. This is one area where mix references are a get out of jail card as if you try to match the bass energy of a mix you know to be balanced with yours, you’re more likely to be creating a well balanced mix than mixing it so it sounds impressive on your system only to find out that it’s wildly bass heavy when played back on a more capable system!