Recording Bass At Home

Over the years I have had many requests for recording tracks at home and my setup has evolved for both Electric and Upright to be a reliable and evidently good sounding set-up.

I have provided tracks for Pop, Jazz & Soul albums, library albums, TV Award Ceremonies and Worldwide Ad Campaigns.

 

The setup revolves around providing a Mic as well as DI for both Electric and Upright. The setup has settled on a Sans-Amp or BSS DI for my electric basses, a Fishman Platinum Pre for my upright pickup, an Audio Technica AT-4033 for the upright acoustically and a Beyer M88 for my speaker cabinet. You room sound is important to the upright sound, so a fairly well controlled acoustic is essential.

Why do I record a Mic, particularly for electric? I like to have something that is 'real' and is moving air in my signal mix. I think it adds some realism and width to the sound. On guitar a D.I.'d signal sounds thin and brittle and although bass sounds more acceptable D.I.'d I think something physical really adds to the richness.

 

If your room is small and full of soft furnishings and carpeted the sound will be controlled, tight and small but may have a reasonable low end. If the room has a hard floor and no soft furnishings it will sound at worst, thin, harsh and unfocussed. A condenser mic picks up all around the capsule and will record bright sounds and reflections as well as the source. It is unlikely you will get a satisfying low end from this environment. A good room will be a mixture of both and experimentation is the key. Having the luxury of recording in some of the top recording spaces in the world it is interesting to note the surroundings. All of the top studios I have worked in have wooden floors. This gives brightness, but also if the sound is too bright you can put a carpet down to control it. Drummers normally do this in places like Abbey Road and Air Lyndhurst for instance. If the sound is too dead and dull you won’t be able to EQ in brightness if it is not there in some form.

 

DAW Setup.

I use Logic X and Logic 9 for my DAW. I set up 6 tracks 3 pairs of 2, one of each pair for the Mic and the other for the D.I. When I have the two tracks configured say 3+4 you use command-option-C to copy the track setup and command-option-V to paste it into the new track. So copy track 3 for the next DI to track 5 and track 4 for the next mic to track 6. Carry on to create as many pairs as you like.

I record on the first 2 tracks, 3+4 in the mix page above recording the composition. If I get to a stage where I want to drop in I enable the next pair 5+6 and start from there and if there is another drop I go from there on 7+8. After finishing I drag the parts into one track and do the cross fades. I find it works quickly for me. I also link each pair for editing in the mix page Bass-1 for the first pair 3+4, Bas-2 for the second pair and Bass-3 for the third. When you click on either of the tracks it selects both. It also edits both at the same time and if you put cross fades between the sections it copies the one for the first track of the pair to the second track. See the mix page example in the Gallery above. I also reverse the phase of the mic of each pair. Go to the 'Gain' plug in and select the 'phase' button. 

When you come to copy them to one track for bouncing down dragging on track drags both together in sync in to the master track. When I comp I copy the whole track with edits into two new tracks. I then merge the copied track, leaving the tracks with all the edits intact, just in case I want to backtrack.

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Bass Cabinet.

For your bass speaker a well built 1x10” cab will be perfect, particularly if you have neighbours. You can however use anything of course, even a 1x8" with an even response will sound good. I use a Beyer TG M88 on my cabinet and it has a lovely smooth response. Place the speaker about 4 inches or 100mm away from the cone to allow the sound to develop, not in the centre but above, below or to the left or right. Experiment with some different positions recording it each time playing the same thing, to fine tune the position. Every mic/cab combination will be different and optimising it will help get the best result. Check out picture #2 in the gallery above.

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Electric D.I.

For the DI I use a late 90s (1998?) Sans Amp Bass Driver D.I. I have it on a very flat setting although switching it on and off does show it is doing a little something. I also use a BSS AR116 as a totally straight through option. I use a short lead and the D.I. and the Mic go into my Audient iD22 audio interface. The iD22 is clean and dynamic sounding and doesn’t seem to add or take away much. I also have a Peterson Strobe tuner looped out of the D.I. Check out picture #1 in the gallery above.

 

Upright Microphone.

I use an Audio Technica AT-4033 on my upright. I have it mounted in front of the bass above the bridge pointing towards the bass but not parallel with the bass front. It is angled slightly up and is about 10 inches or 250mm away from the bass, to give the sound time to breathe.

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Interface and Mic Pres.

You can buy an audio interface for £100 that is of decent quality these days. I use an Audient iD-22 which has nice clean, fast pres. The best thing about it is the fact that it sounds transparent and my Sans Amp, cab mic and bass add the character. It also has a nice simple bit of software to go with it, which controls some of the parameters and is about £300. You can spend a lot more of course! Some of the top end mic pres, Neve, API and the like have colouration, the more you pay the better the colouration is! I'm happy with the Audient, although it doesn't have input level indicators, however I can judge these in my waveform sizes. There are lots of great small interfaces out there and I've only tried a few of them, so go with a good recommendation that fits your budget, try the unit if you can and let your ears make the desicions, not your eyes! Most of the sessions I do are through in big Studios Neve or SSL channels and these always sound good of course! 

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Recording Levels.

Recording your stems at the right level is important, too quiet and you can cause problems with noise further along with the analogue noise going into your system. Also over-recording or peaking into the DAW can cause clipping of either the analogue pre-amp in or digital peaking or both. I have recorded and put together hundreds of tracks and had tracks sent in from remote Studios at a huge range of different levels. One brass instrument was recorded so loud that it appeared flat along the top edges of the waveform. It was seriously ‘over’ recorded. I have also received some tiny waveforms that are, at normal ‘arrange page’ size hard to see. These are not normally a problem unless the mic pres are noisy.

Once the sound is inside your DAW it will not accrue any extra noise, unless you compress it heavily which brings up the background noise. If you are just recording bass stems for a client you don't need to compress them before sending them. Recording so that your peaks are at -6db is a good rule of thumb, but you can recor louder, just make sure your loudest part of the recording is not going to go ‘over’ and off you go. Again its trial and error with levels, so record a test section before you start and try to at least get the waveforms for Mic and D.I. close to each other in amplitude. Reverse the phase on the mic vs the D.I.

I don’t use a compressor on my analogue signal path but some people do. I couldn’t even begin to comment on this subject, so I won’t, but for a lot of people it works well.

 

16bit vs 24bit and 44.1khz vs 48khz vs 88.2 and 96khz.

The bit rate and sample rate are dictated by the project you are doing. It is rare these days to record at 16bit 44.1khz, the standard CD bit/sampling rate.

The 16bit/44.1khz standard was arrived at as it gives a frequency range of 20hz to 20khz, which is the response of the human ear.

Recording at 24bit has become the norm for most projects either at 44.1 or 48khz. It is likely to be 24/48 if it is for video and 24/44.1 for an audio release. Recording at 24bit/48khz increases the dynamic range from 96db for 16bit/44.1khz to 144 db. This huge dynamic range is rather theoretical as 120db for any time at all will deafen you! Also unless you have an environment with very low background noise you won't hear the quietest detail. For every 1 bit increase in bit depth we gain 6db in dynamic range.

If you record at 24bit it has 16,777,216 discreet values of loudness whereas 16bit has 65,536, therefore 24bit has way more resolution. 

Recording 24bit/96khz something I get asked for occasionally. It is normally used for projects where they want to keep the quality and resolution as high as possible. The audio quality is of course top notch but you will only be able to hear it if your analogue source is high quality enough and you have pro standard sound insulation. Your analogue noise from your hardware and limit of dynamic range will prevent you from hearing the full resolution. Also the file sizes are huge!

24bit/88.2khz is another option and I have only recorded for this format once. It increases dynamic range and is a good option as dithering to 16bit/44.1khz uses a frequency divisable by two for the frequency. This could lead to less quantisation distortion although dithering should mask this.

There is a very good article on the Waves website here;

https://www.waves.com/audio-dithering-what-you-need-to-know

Here's a size in Megabites comparison for a Stereo File;

1 minute 16bit/44.1khz-10.58Mb

1 minute 16bit/48khz-11.52Mb

1 minute 24bit/44.1khz-15.88Mb

1 minute 24bit/48khz-17.28Mb

1 minute 24bit/88.2khz-31.75Mb

1 minute 24bit/96khz-34.56Mb.