advice on on-board preamp in the studio

[chaak]

Hello Talkbass community,

something I have been wondering about, I have asked this question to some friends of mine, engineers, producers, musicians, If I am about to start tracking bass on a self-produced album, and I already have worked on producing my bass sound for what fits each of the 9 tracks should I adjust my onboard active Aguilar OBP-3 preamp accordingly for each track or should I leave everything as flat as possible? I know everybody told me the engineer usually requires a flat signal and adjustments will take place during production, mixing.
playing 'raw': preamp flat no effects demotivated me from giving the tracks what I've envisioned the bass to be and how I've approached writing the bass lines.

btw I have discussed things with the studio engineer and we agreed on have two bass signals one D.I. > DAW > Neural DSP Parallax, and the other going through my pedalboard > preamp > cab sim >DAW.

genre is progressive rock/metal.

thanks

 

[N. Kentucky Bass]

Track it flat. Why would you want to limit mixing options in post? Sometimes you don't know how the bass needs to sound until you hear it in the box with everything else.

You can tap and reroute the signal to a headphone mix if you need it for motivation.

 

[silky smoove]

Unless the EQ moves you’re doing are drastic it’ll likely be fine. The notion of tracking with all the EQ knobs flat is a bit of a misnomer anyway. If you’re doing huge EQ moves it might make things challenging for the engineer, or maybe not. If you’re really concerned about it just do the EQ’ing somewhere downstream and capture a clean DI ahead of that EQ.

 

[Aloe]

I'd say go ahead and set up all the knobs the way it sounds better for you. there's nothing wrong with using the onboard preamp to compensate new/old strings or some particular DI limitations (some may lack low end, some may have the treble too pronounced, some have a weird thing going in mids and so on).

my OBP-3 equipped bass is a very nice instrument for recordings. some (most? frankly IDK) of the time it doesn't need EQ or compression in DAW and goes to mix without changing anything. as a sound engineer I like the signals that just sound right out of the box and don't need to be tampered with. recording musicians also love when it happens: they just sound right and don't ask questions like 'why do I sound like **** in my headphones?'.

 

[JRA]

I have discussed things with the studio engineer and we agreed on have two bass signals one D.I. > DAW > Neural DSP Parallax, and the other going through my pedalboard > preamp > cab sim >DAW.

then you have a solution! good for you! sounds like you're the "star" or the "artist" ($$$) so i'd expect that any engineer would gladly try to accommodate your requests/needs.

the reason why "clean" is generally advised = it's the best policy when the engineer is in doubt about the direction/"sound" of the final product....so it's an engineer thing. as a player, you can anticipate that "clean" will always work.

"flat" is never perfect (and it doesn't have to be! just needs to be workable), but the competent engineer can advise whether or not the signal is good/"workable" or what would be better/best for the recording (which is different from the music!). the player can accommodate as best she/he can within the boundaries of that player's abilities.

TL;DR: the engineer's judgment and abilities are the final arbiters of what you can do in any studio, great or small.

 

[tylerwylie]

I split the signal so I record a dry flat signal through my mic preamp and then use another channel for my effected tone which could have some sort of saturation, effects, reverb, speaker simulation going on. Best case scenario is you grab a great DI signal, maybe a great amp/preamp signal, and maybe have more of the effected stuff to feed your monitoring situation. You want to play with a tone that inspires you, but also have your ass covered in case something happens.

 

[DirkP]

This is the reason I don't like onboard preamps
But in this case, if you are the engineer and producer and didn't chose the tone you dial in on the OBP for monitoring, but instead to fit the entire track, I'd stay with the onboard preamp. If you would have the outboard gear or plug-ins to reach the same or better results as with the onboard preamp, you wouldn't ask.
It is only problematic if you later put a second preamp with EQ on top of the OBP. The interaction between two different EQs in series can produce unwanted degredation of the signal, although in rare occasions it can be a desired effect.