I’ve got home recorded bass sounding much better. I’m an amp guy I’ve generally hated the sound of direct bass with a passion, but with a little compression and pultec style eq it sounds great recorded. You can tell CCR did it at least sometimes.

My new fuss is this fuzz bass sound I got. I have a combination of effects and Ampeg V2 that gets a bass sound that sounds just like Martin Rev’s left hand in the room, but it sucks recorded. I basically never use fuzz or effects on bass and I’ve burned a couple weeks just trying to get it happening but its not at all.

I’m playing on the 12th fret on the bass, tone at zero, and there’s a sub octave from the Shields Blender, normal octave, and another top octave from a Maestro style Black Cat Octave Fuzz. Normally I hate the octave down black keys thing but this is really something different. More Suicide/Oneida/El Dorado era Neil Young

I think part of the issue is that the two pedals I’m using have blend functions. That works great in the room, but I think I need to rig something up where I am balancing different clean or dirty signals from different amps that I can then mix on the board. I’m going to try out a combination of amps as direct bass isn’t really happening in this situation at all, even clean. I can probably try to limit the shit out of the DI so it’s closer to the “clean” sound coming out of the amp, but running the effects into a DI is a 100% no-go. Sounds like garbage.

So maybe setting up multiple amps and careful micing with close and ambient mics will get me somewhere, but I’m so burned out from trying to make it work I started working on something else. Of course when I did I got a regular bass sound I wanted in 5 minutes, but this other thing is going to haunt me.

Maybe try bass —> buffered splitter
Then out to your amp/pedal rig from one side and into a DI on the other?
If a DI sounds too sterile you can always re-amp it or put an amp sim on the channel and dial in an appropriate level of grit without losing whatever it is you're losing.

I was trying to reply to this thread and ended up in C/NC?!

Cross post to make it worse

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2023 7:35 pm I found a really fun little mic for not too much money:

https://youtu.be/duo8r9gs3N4?si=35YKGldMUdjut4Ot

I bought it on FM Manny Nieto’s recommendation and it really kills on a bass cabinet paired with other mics. It’s about the price of a pedal and can be used with bass or drums and can be laid on the floor or hung on a mic stand.

I have this batshit crazy bass rig going and this fit in beautifully

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Tue Oct 17, 2023 10:08 am I was trying to reply to this thread and ended up in C/NC?!

Cross post to make it worse

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2023 7:35 pm I found a really fun little mic for not too much money:

https://youtu.be/duo8r9gs3N4?si=35YKGldMUdjut4Ot

I bought it on FM Manny Nieto’s recommendation and it really kills on a bass cabinet paired with other mics. It’s about the price of a pedal and can be used with bass or drums and can be laid on the floor or hung on a mic stand.

I have this batshit crazy bass rig going and this fit in beautifully

Kinda like Sylvia Massy's sm57 in a garden hose trick.

Tried out a ton of mics on a reamped bass track. The bass track was an Ovation Magnum with flatwound strings, so very specific: 60s-70s bass, post-upright sort of thing going. Ampeg V2 amp, Mesa Boogie 1x15 speaker. I just got it sounding as good as I could in the room. I was not trying to be exact except for being pretty much dead center on the cone close to the grill. Levels/preamp gain and effects were matched to a standard -12 peak but nothing too crazy.

The bass track was recorded dry and direct and then was sent through a Spectra C610 for peak limiting on the way out before being reamped - it has specific utility but the GR VU wasn’t really moving, so it’s not necessarily a super pronounced effect, but you could hear it. I had a whole song built already so I was listening to everything in context.

My favorites were an old Sennheiser 421 and a Beyer 201, which had the most character. The Ovation bass has thick lows but can have its midrange eaten up depending on what’s going on, and those mics gave a kind of point to made it sound eq’d and done - like those mics made the bass sound like it was further processed by precious vintage tube gear or something.

I’d tried a bunch of other stuff against it - mostly dynamics (RE20, M88 and Alien8 mics did the most for the low end) - but also ribbons (KU5A and M130) and two condensers. i could have tried more condensers, but it was easier to adjust gain without having to worry about phantom power or pads on the preamp. The M130 ribbon was the best for an interesting upright impression.

The only disaster was the AKG 451 - I saw Steve used those on bass in that great Sound On Sound article and he must have had some special attachment because the mic was overloaded and unusable, even padded down at the preamp.

Anyways, for that bass I will probably just grab the old white 421 as default from now on. Note that it’s the cheapest one I mentioned here, even for an old one. Its the only thing that really beats a heavily processed direct signal for that 60s sort of CCR/Motown kind of sound. I’m not playing rock music that requires gobs of low end, but if that’s all I was after, a mic like an RE20 in front of the amp with that bass and would be plenty sufficient.

I still want to gouge out the middle P position of the Ovation Magnum and put another pickup in there, but I think the 421 will save me the trouble for now.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Sun Jun 01, 2025 12:14 pm Tried out a ton of mics on a reamped bass track.

…

My favorites were an old Sennheiser 421 and a Beyer 201, which had the most character.

Putting off homework so I’ll write about the experience I had recording low volume bass last night. I’ve been working on fleshing out a half-hour improvisation on nylon string, and instead of doing the sensible thing and editing it down first, I’ve been overdubbing a half hours worth of instruments one or two at time. I don’t know what its turning into, but the accompanying tracks are being recorded 30 minutes a take with minimal editing, though there is plenty being thrown away.

I had a DI’d Thunderbird bass track I’d recorded that I intended to keep, but it definitely needed to see an amp and a speaker, so I started working on it very late last night, maybe around midnight.

I put my favored old white 421 on a 1x15 and eq’d the YBA3 amp for the room, then pointed the mic about where it needed to be with headphones, going back and forth between the amp and the desk. Maybe spent 20 minutes doing that? The mic ended up being as close as it cold get on the grill pointed off center. I also left a Sony C38b with an Audioscape LA2A on record that I had been using for vocals and a room mic for drums that I high passed and dialed in a tiny bit with a few millisecond delay upon playback so it didnt wreck the phase.

At one point when I was fine tuning the 421 mic position and YBA3 amp eq I had ripped the headphones off thinking it was blasting away while everyone was asleep. Nope! The amp wasn’t loud in the room at all. The headphones were up a bit, but nothing crazy, it was just present and jumping out of the headphones in a pleasing way. Success!

That sound working that quickly isn’t always easy for the pseudo-motown sorta thumpy and growly sounds - sometimes they get eaten up by other things going on, and while it was always sounds good to put the bass way upfront in that style, it still has to fit, and god knows whats happening in the headphone mix. I find eq-ing the mid range to be a time waster generally - aside from a simple cut here and there on a graphic eq (which can still take me forever) I would much rather have that worked out at the tracking phase and then just add or cut lows and highs as needed.

Aside from the YBA3 and old 421 playing well together, the Spectra 610 peak limiters also really help crank the track. I just set it at its slowest and lowest ratio so that the threshold is only sometimes engaged, and the sound doesn’t change that much (compared to a DI 1073 style straight in), but you can push the track louder without getting into trouble with the peaks.

So this one went:

Di chain: Thunderbird bass > EA DI > 610 > recorder

Reamp chain: Recorder > EA DI > YBA3 > 1x15 > 421 > 610 > recorder

The Spectra was in peak limiting mode going in both ways, but there were a couple spots where it went into compression mode, in the parts when I was hammering around the 10th-12th fret on the E string.

Anyways, I would prefer to grab another mic besides the 421 pretty much every time. It just seems sort of boring and i tend to want to grab a consensor. But every time I put it on something I get a great sound with no fuss.

The newer ones seem like they are better for rock bass sounds with some extra (good) trash in the high end, but I totally recommend the old white 421s with the strange connectors, you just have to be sure not to grab one with a weird impedance. Mine is the ‘421-N’ with a script logo and was the same cost as a used newer model, even with international shipping at the time. I should probably get another at some point.

Also need to remember to always record a spare di track with electric instruments - I don’t think I’ve ever made anything worse by reamping it, though It’s all pretty much amp straight into guitar type cleanish sounds, even if I have to use a pedal to get it.

I usually just grab a Beta 52 or one of my cheapo MXL 144 Ribbons, which actually sound pretty beefy on a bass cab. Sometimes I do an LDC of some sort but only if I'm feeling frisky.

Back fighting my bass. I have a 70s Gibson Thunderbird that is my favorite sounding bass in the room, but recorded the low end is smeared and really hard to deal with, even compared to an Ovation magnum.

It’s like I can use a cardioid dynamic mic dead center on a 15” speaker and it still sounds like I’m getting too much room. Trying just a DI wasn’t really getting me what I wanted either but I usually have to run it through a bunch of outboard before I find direct sounds acceptable.

I looked at it with a scope and it was getting some 20 hz that def needs to be filtered out, but I’m thinking this just isn’t an easy bass to record outside of driving rock sounds. It’s a neck through and got a lot of low end happening, not much above 500 hz played with fingers and something just isn’t translating. The decay of the note is different than on a bolt on bass. This was supposed to be my rock bass but I might see if some flat or tapewound strings, which have a quicker decay, might help.

I tried playing with the Ampeg’s EQ, surrounding the bass amp with gobos, filtering with plugs after it had already been recorded, and no dice. It’s bad enough that I’m redoing the bass track on a 30 minute long project that I’ve been working on for over a while now.

I’ve been micing it with a tried and true Beyer M201 or an old 421 and gettng the same results either way. Maybe I can start looking through frequency charts and see if any of my percussion mics like (D112, AKG D3600, EV 408B) might work. Sometimes ribbons also do interesting cuts in the low mids, so I’ll check those as well.

My gold standard for the sort of sound I’ve been going for with this has been CCR and James Jamerson, which I can do all day in the room, but while it’s a sound that’s easy to copy its hard to make exciting - not a sound you want to half ass or it just sounds goofy as hell. And since that’s kind of a murky sound already, it’s a real balancing act with a few different factors and can go overboard easily.

Edit: I resolved with a KU5A off center mixed with a DI signal. Still kind of too growly for what I want, but that’d what Thunderbirds do. While I liked the white421 for my Ovation Magnum and T40 I’ll have to play around and see what works best with the Gibson bass.

RE-20