The Jimmy Page School of Music Production states that...

Whatever works is the best - it's all smoke and mirrors.
 
I was tracking a cover for my wife last night, nothing too fancy, just an early demo. Now, so far, all my attempts at recording bass left me rather disappointed. Whether it was through the POD HD or Amplitube SVX or any other plug-in, it just sounded lame. I blamed it in part on the instrument - my wife's cheap Squier Bronco, with its odd one single coil pick up. But I still believed that I should have been able to work something out of it.
 
So last night when the time came to lay down the bass track, I just didn't feel like tweaking emulations to no avail - I plugged direct into one of my little practice amp and hooked the headphones output to my audio interface. Well, what do you know... The crappy bass came to life, and the whole thing sounded pretty ballsy.
 
So thanks to this cheap little Fender guy, which I never thought I'd actually use to track anything...
 

 

Didn't someone once say "If it sounds good, it is good?" 

It is all smoke and mirrors.....
 
The only thing that matters is what it sounds like in the mix. 
 
And yes, I have heard some pretty awesome sounding bass and guitar tone on some mixes here through the years, that the individual said was recorded on a cheap little practice amp with a tiny 4" speaker or some other weird thing...
 
whatever works.   I prefer the hardware solution most often. Mic a small amp or my POD2 plugged into the interface.

Hi,
 
Honestly? My biggest disappointment, might just be that while playing/practicing the bass, I have never found a sound that was satisfying, and I do not know what to do or turn to, other than trial and error.
 
I'm thinking that having a reasonable amp would help, and I will probably answer all that in the next couple of months, but still ... a bit strange.

I guess it may be one of the reasons why I often struggle with mixes - other than for electronic music, I happen not to like low end all that much, on record anyway, and certainly not as much as it is inherent to modern day production. So I'm trying my best to come up with an acceptable compromise.
 
I remember a few years ago listening to a recent Iron Maiden album and then going back to The Number of The Beast and realizing how the older albums sound much more intelligible and smoother. There was a ton more information frequency-wise on the more recent album, afforded by high resolution recording, but the results were less interesting. It lacked focus and clarity.
 
The same is true of just about every bands I like, from the late 90s onward. And it's not just a matter of loudness.
 
Too much bass on everything, all the time, and it sounds "flat" in a weird way, because the energy down there is constant, no matter how well managed it is. There's no room for the mids to breathe, and the stuff that isn't actual music is made as important as the stuff that is music...

This could easily turn into another huge "how to make a bass sit well in the mix" thread, but anyway to my ears anything involving Donald Fagen always has just the right amount of low end. Even if you're not a fan of his music, his latest album is a great example of brilliantly mixed bass frequencies.

craigb
One very overlooked fact about the good older recordings is how much less distortion was used on the guitars than you thought.
 
A lot of distortion sounds great when your in your bedroom wanking away by yourself, but in a mix it just doesn't work well.

 
Wow, thanks for that mental image (not!).
 
Note to self..... never, ever, ever, ever, ever borrow a guitar from craigb.
 
I agree about the distortion bit. I wouldn't know about the other thing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
How many hands does that man have ? No, don't go there.......Where's Bapu when you actually need him ?. I need reminding of something trivial to remove this awful image from my head.

The Back in Black album by AC/DC is a classic example of hot and heavy guitars that weren't artificially distorted at all. Just good old crankin' it up.