How to Record a Punchy and Powerful Bass Guitar

Getting a juicy bass sound is something we all want right?

Dealing with the low-end is tricky. It’s like sand. It gets everywhere when you only want it to stay on the ground. Bad analogies aside, low-end is pretty tricky to deal with, and during recording there are some things you should consider when you’re dealing with bass instruments in general.

Let’s start with making sure you have the right performance.

Bass Guitar Performance

An engineer friend of mine thinks the bass performance is the most important aspect of a song. The right bass line can really make a song or a groove come together. If you have the wrong bass line or an unsteady groove, things can fall apart pretty easily. Therefore, choosing the right bass line, or right bass player is of the essence when you’re recording the all-important foundational instrument. You don’t want a sloppy performance. All you’ll end up with is a wishy-washy foundation that just never feels right.

If the bass player can’t seem to get into the groove, send him home. Make him practice. If he can’t play his part he needs to learn how. Life’s too short to waste hours of your time editing. If the bass player can’t play his part correctly, you’re never going to end up with a good foundation or a groovy song.

Also, make sure the bass lines fit the song. Sometimes a band has been playing together for a while in a rehearsal space where everything kind of blends into one.

If you notice weird notes that clash with the rest of the production, make sure to notify the artist. Just like you don’t want a bass part that can’t lock with the groove of the drums, you also don’t want a bass part that clashes with the harmonic content of the guitars or other instruments.

Be Aware of Your Acoustics

Bass is a very powerful frequency, and the room around the bass amplifier can easily muddy up really quickly. Try to avoid placing a bass amp in a very reflective room; you want to minimize all the reflections you can.

Additionally, the more bass trapping you can do, the better. The more bass traps a room has, the tighter the bass will sound in the room, and the cleaner a bass will be recorded. Even a bunch of sofas, rolled up blankets and thick mattresses can help reduce wandering bass frequencies from muddying up your signal.

How to Record the Bass Guitar

Now, let’s get technical.

We want a tight bass sound that’s thick and deep but still has definition and punchiness. You can either record bass directly, via a DI box, or you can mic up the bass cabinet. Some engineers rely only on DI to get their sound, dismissing the cabinet entirely. But others like the combination of the DI’d signal with the miked-up cab.

If you have the option of recording both, then take the opportunity and record both.

DI Recording

Recording directly via a DI box is great if you’re left without an amp. Just plug your bass straight into your interface, or use a DI box.

Some producers won’t even think about miking up the amplifier. They’ll just plug the bass into a DI box and plug it straight into the interface. This takes all the acoustic problems out of the equations, which is great.

You can also record through a pre-amplifier. Instead of the signal going into a cabinet and out of the speakers, you can just route the bass part directly into your audio software. A pre-amp can add that much-needed warmth to your bass sound.

Sometimes you want a tight DI’d bass sound to keep that low-end tight. The DI sound, however, is a sound of its own, and if you don’t like the sound of a DI’d bass you’re out of luck.

You can often fix that with an amp modeler to round the tone out. A DI’d sound can sometimes sound too “stringy,” so an amp modeler can really help you round out your tone.

It’s definitely an easy way to do things, and something home studio engineers find very attractive.

Recording the amplifier

It’s a little trickier to record a bass amp. Especially if you’re in a home studio. You want the cleanest sound possible, and if you’re in a sub-par room you need to isolate your amp.

Throwing thick blankets over the amp and microphone can work to deaden some of the reflections. Putting the amp in a padded closet is also a way to keep the reflections out.

Finding the Sweet Spot

The quick and dirty way to record a guitar cabinet is to throw a dynamic mic up to the grill and hit record. You’ll get a close and full range sound from your guitar, but miking up the bass cabinet is a bit different.

A Little bit of Physics

Here is a short physics lesson. Let’s say we want to capture the thickness of the bass around 80 Hz.

Sound travels at 1130ft/344m per second. Lower frequencies travel slower, and take longer to finish one period of their wavelength. If we know this, we can actually calculate where we should put the mic.

Wavelength = Speed of sound(1130ft or 344m) / Frequency

We want the thickness of the 80 Hz.

Plugging 80 Hz into the formula we see that:

1130(OR 344M)/80HZ = 14.125 Ft. or 4.3 Meters

Now we know the full wavelength of 80 Hz, or how long it takes 80 Hz to travel one cycle, as shown in the image above.

But we don’t want to capture the energy of 8 Hz at the end of its cycle. You can see that the most amount of energy coming from the wave is around 1/4 of its cycle. This is where the sine wave peaks. By dividing the waveform by 4 we see where the most amount of 80 Hz is located.

14.125/4 = 3.53 ft, or approx. 1 meter.

Now we know where we should put the microphone in front of the bass cabinet if we really wanted to accent the 80 Hz. Placing your microphone like this doesn’t mean you’re not capturing any other frequency. It means that in that position, that particular wavelength is very strong and prominent.

Recording the Acoustic Bass

The double bass, or contrabass is a very different instrument from the rock sound of the electric bass. It’s much more different than the electric bass, and you will need a much more different approach. A large diaphragm condenser is usually your best bet when it comes to the double bass. The dynamic would capture the low-end well enough, but it just doesn’t have the clarity that you would need with an acoustic instrument such as the acoustic bass. A ribbon is also a desirable alternative, for a thick and smooth sound.

A few quick and dirty techniques that work really well most of the time.

1. A condenser mic, omni in a good room, otherwise cardioid, placed at least 1.5 foot from the center of the body. Move around to get the sweet spot.
2. A small diaphragm condenser wrapped in foam, placed under the bridge facing upwards toward the fingerboard. Catches the fretboard as well as the wood.
3. Avoid small rooms. Find a larger room to record the bass so the room can really translate the sound of the instrument.
4. Mix mics together. A contact mic, such as an electret mic that you can pin close to the fretboard in conjunction with a large diaphragm condenser in front can capture both the sound of the body as well as the sound of the fingers plucking the strings.

Whatever type of bass track you’re recording, whether it’s electric, synthesizer or stand-up, you need to capture the full sound of the bass.

Even though you might think of a bass as only occupying a very special and narrow frequency range, the fact is that if you don’t get a balanced sound and focus too much on the bass that’s what you’ll get – a very thick and muddy bass sound without any definition. So the next time you’re recording bass, make sure you’re capturing the full extent of the instrument.

Recording Well to Start With

If you record the cabinet, as well as a DI’d signal, you get best of both worlds. Later, you can combine both signals to get the sound you are looking for. You’ll have both to choose from, giving you a nice palette of bass sounds to choose from.

As always, if you’re recording a cabinet, make sure your bass is sounding good in the room. Get everything right at the source and make sure that the bass sound you are hearing before you record is the bass sound you want recorded. You don’t want to record a lackluster bass track that’s impossible to fix in the mix. Record it well at the source and you’ll save yourself a lot of heartache during mixing.

Image by: Mourner

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