Saturday, March 30, 2019

How to record a song part 3/6: bass!



Once we have all of our drum recordings done it's time to track the instrument that serves as bridge between the rhythmic section of the song and the harmonic one: the bass.

The bass is an instrument that can be recorded in several ways: it can be real, or it can be Midi (click here for an article about virtual bass), it can be played with the fingers, or with a pick.
The first thing to do before recording a real bass is to dedicate some time to its mantainance: it's a good idea to clean the fretboard, and especially to mount new strings (click here for a dedicated article), in order to have all the harmonic richness we can (with time the strings tend to become more dull sounding and lose their brightness).

After we have the new strings mounted it's time to control the intonation (click here for a dedicated article) so that we are sure that the bass is in tune in all the points of the fretboard.

Once our bass is ready to rock, we need to decide how to record it.
There are several ways:

- To record straight into the audio interface, directly from the bass or through a bass preamp

- To microphone a bass cabinet

- To do both of the above at the same time with a splitter

The purpose, as we will see in the bass mixing part, is to have a clean bass track to use as the low-end part of the tone, and another one (that can be distorted before reaching the audio interface or via plugin) that will provide the upper range with all the effects/coloring we want.

If the bass player wants to use his own gear (amp, stompboxes and so on), remember to put them in the right order, click here for an article about the perfect bass effect chain.


CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/6: DRUMS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 6/6: KEYBOARDS AND EXTRA ARRANGEMENTS!


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