What frequency range should be captured upon input for electric bass guitar?

Hello, all. Hope everyone is well. I'm finally getting back to work (for now) and wanted to pick your brains on this (and say hi).
 
So here's the deal... I finally set my little studio room up so I can actually use all my gear again. I had been just tracking my bass straight into the multi in on my Focusrite Scarlett 18i6 and then manipulating it with various effects within Sonar. I've been getting okay results with that but obviously it's not ideal and it's a LOT of fiddling and screwing around for just an "okay" sound.
 
So not having any other real gear for bass I hooked up my old Line6 Duoverb (which is a modelling amp head for guitar) via the two XLR outs on the back into the XLR multi ins on the front of the Scarlett. The Line6 allows for two amp models to run at once and I can send them out independently (which is what I have done). So after screwing around with some of the various sound I've got one kind of cleaner but fatter line/DI type signal and a crisp/picky type signal with a bit of grit/drive.
 
This sounds good to me through the headphones (much better than DI even after molding the sound in Sonar) but I am concerned that perhaps because the Duoverb is a guitar head it might be cutting out frequencies that might make it hard to mix into a full composition.
 
So the question to you hardened veterans is... when I am looking at these signals through a freq analyst (currently I am using the Quad Curve flyout) what should I be seeing? It looks to me at the moment that I am getting a good healthy signal in the 80hz range on both channels that starts sloping at around 60hz then tapers off from there beyond the 20hz range. Above the 80hz the two kind of vary but the high slope starts around 150hz and from there there are undulating peaks up to just above the 1khz range. The peaks are obviously higher nearer the meat of the tone (80hz) then descend in volume as they approach the 1khz+ range.
 
I know that's using numbers instead of my ears to try and decide on a sound but I figure you guys would know if the amp is cutting something out on input that might screw me up later. Really... it does sound good so far but what the hell do I know and this particular project is still just a work in progress. I've used the Duoverb for bass in the past (long time ago) but it never turned out right... however I was a COMPLETE hack when it comes to mixing back then. Now I'm only kind of a hack. lol
 
Anyway, nice to be back thinking about music. Hope to have more time to hang out on the forum again. Cheers and thanks for any thoughts on this.

Removed my thread.  Sorry, I thought this was about the sound of your bass - not just frequency.

I know that when Danny jumps back in he will give you a lot of good info here but I figured I might be able to help some in the meantime.
 
  I have most often found that I seem to be able to warm up the sound if it needs more bottom relatively transparently.  But if I needed more top end on a bass guitar I have already captured to get it to cut through a mix it always sounds doctored up & weird.  You can cut the lows/boost highs, and add some gain to get a little grit on it, or use exciters to pull up some harmonics, I have had to do this but I am never "happy" with that sound.  So I tend to try to capture a good balanced sound at the source and make sure that I have plenty of top end on it from the start.  As for the frequencies, it can vary a bit based on the key of the song and which element is going to OWN the bottom end.  The bass?  or the Kick?   55-65hz is the region on the bass where you really "feel" it rumble, which adds that warm/rich vibe, 300-400 sounds like paper and I usually cut it back a bit somewhere in there.  I like to have a good strong signal from around 50hz up to 6-7K, granted it is obviously strongest in that 80-130 range and slopes back down into the high end.  There is not much going on for a bass up above that 7-8 k range other than pick noise and hiss.  I have had mixes where I lowpassed the bass at 2500 cycles to get rid of too much pick noise/twang, others I had it up at 8k.    
Aim for a nice capture, Compress, then EQ (if you compress after Eq the compressor just twists your Eq to hell anyway).   when tracking rock stuff I shoot for a punchy kinda sound.... think emmm  Longview from greenday or something along those lines.  I hope that helps some Beep.

Sorry for the late reply, guys. Went into phone call mode yesterday and been waiting for my fingers to heal up a bit from playing bass a few days straight after not practicing for a while.
 
@Rimshot... Hi, dude. No worries. Kind of wish you had left your post intact. I was actually interested in watching that vid you had and thought your comment was relevant. I had a couple of things in mind to reply with as input issues are something I need to sort out. Currently I'm kind of stuck with what I've got but am always feeling out ideas for what to get/do when I have a bit more cash. Anyway, hope you've been well and sorry I didn't get to your post right away. I was laying down for the night when I saw it and got busy doing other things yesterday. Thanks though.
 
@Chuck... Definitely helpful. I was looking at your numbers and they weren't syncing up with what I was seeing but I realized that I was just riding the low E. Just did some more fiddling around and when start playing up to the G string in first position I am indeed getting up around the 5khz range (if I went up the neck I'd probably hit the 6-7k range). The more rounded bottomy tone is kind of cutting off at about 3-4khz but that's my filler tone. The other channel is making up for it. Mixed it's definitely giving me a nice punchy tone and it's funny you mention Green Day/Longview. I'm not a big GD fan these days but that album was something I really liked and still love the bass tone. It's pretty much what I seem to be getting with this... at least through the headphones, and is what I'm looking for. This is all without in the box processing so it should be a good starting point anyway. Also I knew about the Compress before EQ thing but had kind of forgotten since I've taken so much time off so that little reminder is quite helpful. I'm gonna have to play around with the various compressors to see what's gonna work best. I have a bit of an issue with this bass though. It's an old Squire P-Bass that I've had for years and basically it was on loan to various band members and friends. So it's got the cheap single coil which is rather uneven sounding in the sense that the high notes get kind of thin and crispy while the lower notes are fatter and more dampened. On top of that the last guy who was using it dropped it in the damned road without a case (didn't even tell me either... moron) so the pickup is lopsided because one of the tension screw hole on the pickup housing busted. I think I'm gonna try the Anderton trick of filtering out the frequencies with a multiband compressor and taming the higher notes that way if necessary. A new pickup is on the list of gear to buy at the moment but again kind of have to make do with what I've got. Thanks for the input. You're a good guy. Cheers.
 
@Danny... Hi, man. Glad you popped in and I'm sorry to hear you're having a rough time. Fire me a PM if you need to vent. Things have been pretty wonked around here for quite a while too so I've basically dropped everything to get that sh*t sorted out. Looks like it'll all work out though so keeping my fingers crossed.
 
Anyway, awesome stuff as always. We've had the discussion about the Kick vs. Bass scenario before (clicky bass/thuddy kick or clicky kick/bottomy bass) and this seems to be a more advanced lesson in that concept which is great. I think I learned a lot from the Beepster Creep debacle so I am looking forward to getting this bass/drum balance locked down with this go around. As you may remember I was indeed having a very difficult time with a non existent (or not so present/powerful bass) and then a boomy bass after my muddled attempts to correct it. This is kind of why I wanted work on my input signal so I had a much better jumping off point than the straight Hi-Z DI. The Scarlett does have a great sounding Inst. setting but it was still just a direct in. Right now what I'm getting is already sounding better than what I had after endless tweaking and screwing around with effects.
 
I like the comment about the older school rock having the kick and bass closer together because in a lot of ways I kind of want that but kind of don't. Like I don't necessarily want the bass getting too blended in or unnoticeable like those older recordings but I also don't want it to be sticking out like a sore thumb. One thing I was playing around with the other day was the EQ types on the Quad Curve. Up until now I had pretty much been sticking with the "Hybrid" setting or trying to use more surgical type EQ's where everything is flat until I move something and then only that part of the frequency is being affected. After messing around with the Blue Tubes Pultec model X3 came with and reading up about these EQ's that boost and cut simultaneously or create interesting curves I got adventurous and tried the Quad Curve "Pure" setting (and the others) and I gotta say there's a bit of magic there. I've always shied away because it always felt like I wasn't in complete control watching those wacky curves going all over the place but now I realize there is a reason for it and they would not have modeled that stuff unless it was beneficial. Just gotta tweak and listen I guess. Interesting stuff.
 
In regards to the listening situation... well my set up is still the same so not really good. I have been spending a LOT of time on my two main sets of headphones for general listening (TV shows, movies, music, whatever) so I think my ears are getting pretty well trained to how they respond and I'm finding that flopping between the two pairs I can isolate issues and then things sound good in both and then I can put things through the monitors and it will be reflected there as well. I also have both my stereo systems set up in another room, my two sets of laptop speakers and a bagfull of other headphones/earbuds I can test things through. Might have a bit more monetary leeway soon too so a VRM box is my next acquisition. With all that I should at least be able to get decent mixes together and let the mastering guys do the mastering if something needs to be released commercially. I am annoyed though because I expected to have at least a few more songs mixed at this point because I need the practice but this apartment bullsh*t really consumed all my time and messed with my head to the point any real time at the DAW was impossible. Screw the gear, screw the room, screw it all... what I REALLY need is practice. The one benefit has been all this mixing stuff has been percolating in the back of my mind this whole time so now that I'm in front of the rig again the concepts are sticking, I'm not stumbling or getting confused over simple crap and more importantly the material is flowing so much I can't keep up with it.
 
Whatever... too much talking there but I typed it so I'll leave it. lol
 
As far as the Duoverb, it is indeed a guitar head but it seems, based on this thread and from what I am hearing/seeing in my experiments, that it's giving me all the signals I need to get a quality bass signal to work with. Better than just plugging into the interface anyway which really is my only other option right now. You have all the really high end goodies kicking around so it might not be much use to you and it is very much original modelling stuff but they can be had for dirt cheap these days and they really are quite cool for the price. I paid about $300 for it about 6 years ago and although it did not serve its intended purpose (I just wanted a head for live and it just wouldn't push enough on stage for what I was doing but I always had a hard time finding enough power for my insanity) in the studio it has been absolutely great. It's got the two XLR outs, two channels that can be split or blended (via the line outs or to speakers), each channel has 8 models (total 16 models... the hi gain ones are kind of ass but the clean ones are really good for this type of pre input stuff), cabinet modelling and each channel has it's own strip of independent controls like you'd find on a normal amp (Drive, Volume, Bass, Mid, Tone, Reverb, etc). It also has four programmable banks onboard so if you like something you just press and hold one of the bank buttons and it saves everything and you can go back to manual mode and screw around with all the knobs/models and return to the bank and it's all there despite any changes to the knobs. You get the idea. Pretty archaic by today's standards but it still gets great reviews and like I said it's cheap as hell (probably easily obtained for a lot less than the $300 I paid for the 100w head). If you see one around it might be worth the dough just to play around with it. I personally just love it for the i/o crap it has.
 
Well that's a blast of inanity and insanity but it's good to chat with you again. Still dealing with some chaos but I should be around again. I've been pondering a few things for you but that can wait for another day. I'm gonna go mess around with this track a bit. I might put together a little snippet of this bass tone so you can check it out but I want to get my guitar tone down too so it can be heard in context. I'm only on scratch guit tracks right now that I did DI so that's the next adventure. Cheers and thanks.

Someone recently posted an old thread about EQ which referenced a link called, "The Dipping Sauce". I quickly copied it and pasted it into my Notes on my iPad. My iPad has become a handy companion these days when I am mixing. Anyway, I have pasted in the Bass comments from that link below:

bass
reduce fundamentals at 40hz (q 1.4)
reduce resonance at 100hz (q 1.4)

I have been experimenting a little with doing a slight dip at 100hz on the last couple of songs I have mixed and in my case, for me, it kind of did as advertised; made for a cleaner bass tone.

I still mix everything by ear on bass and there seems to be no clear set frequencies, it depends on the song and what I am playing. By ear I roll off the lows until it sits right, same with the highs. If it's not adding anything up there it's gone.

@batsbrew... Thanks. Yeah, that's where this experiment is going. As nice as all these fancy software effects are there just always seems to be a compromise going on. Try and cut something to get rid of an obnoxious frequency and something good gets yanked out. Try to boost something cool and another thing that isn't so cool is all of a sudden popping out. Try and fix wonked out levels with a compressor or whatever and things sound all smashy and thin. It's just a pain and frankly I'd rather be working on writing, practicing and tracking. The little tweaking experiments I've done with the EQ's and compressors so far with THIS signal have been more complimentary than some kind of elaborate exercise out of necessity. Basically I'm not desperately struggling to make it sound like a bass because it already does. I'm just messing around with things to make it work better with the other stuff going on.
 
That said... I do not regret being forced to use the crummier signals I had been. In fact I kind of did that on purpose. I've blathered about this before but I actually WANTED to work with crap signals and try to fix them up so they sound alright for the experience. Now though after this past year I just want things to be easy from the get go. I need to release some new material and I actually have some people crawling up my butt to write stuff for them so I have to get on with it. Cheers.
 
@Makeshift... I'll keep that in mind. Seems very specific though. I spent a lot of time a year ago trying to learn the whole paint by numbers approach to mixing and then when I went to apply it I realized all this stuff is constantly moving around and there are million and one approaches. It was all good to have some general guidelines but I have all these extensive notes I made from some of the Groove3 vids based on specific mixes that I realize now are kind of useless to me because they working with different genres and instruments. The truisms are there though so tweaking the Freq knobs and Q's ends up ballparking it in but you're right with the ears thing (as Danny points out frequently)... science is great but it ain't jack if it doesn't sound good.
 
Kind of where I'm at with this. I'm trying to capture every frequency I need upon input so I can mold it from there in mixing if need be instead of endlessly polishing turds. Cheers and thanks.

Danny,
 
I should have been more specific in my response, you are absolutely correct when you say each instrument and track offers its own unique set of issues....or non-issues.  I always use my ears when making EQ adjustment and don't generally make adjustments, unless I have a goal specifically in mind.
 
I take all of these "starting points" with a grain of salt.  They only tell me in what general area I might start to look.  I then start to scope that area to see if it's going to help me with the issue I am trying to address or not.  I just usually make changes by ear, what sounds best and knowing what general area to start looking at helps when you don't do this every day, day in and day out.

I guess I approach EQ and FX more musically than I do scientifically. Much like adjusting the knobs on a guitar amp. I twiddle with them until it sounds good. I'm more artistically logical, than engineering scientific.