How Do I?

[claudel]

So, this is a two part posting




#1 This is a pretty great little jam...

The Creek - Lukas Kuban & Adrian Maruszczyk

Featuring a couple of awesome Stradi basses

#2 Recording questions

What sort of processing, filtering, etc can make this recording sound so good on small speakers?

I'm guessing there's a HPF, but what settings? Compressor, eq?

The low end is close to perfect, present, full, and not at all mushy on my well worn ancient system while most live recordings don't sound anywhere close to that good

TIA

 

[Wasnex]

Compression, HPF, EQ, a little bit of reverb. Als, possibly a bit of saturation/distortion. The rest is instrument, string choice, set up, playing technique, and musical ideas.

How to adjust? There is not a fixed recipe. Instead you must select appropriate gear and apply knowledge, skill, and judgement.

 

[ole Jason]

I don't hear any saturation/distortion on those tracks but it's possible. The bass tracks don't sound overly processed so the HPF, compressor, eq, etc. are probably set up fairly conservatively. Plugins like Ozone can get you in the ballpark pretty quickly if you want something easy and fast.

 

[Wasnex]

I don't hear any saturation/distortion on those tracks but it's possible.

I was thinking more along the lines of a device that sounds clean, but adds a bit of magic fairy dust rather than obvious distortion.

 

[40Hz]

I was thinking more along the lines of a device that sounds clean, but adds a bit of magic fairy dust rather than obvious distortion.

You could get that fairy dust with just the right preamp or filter. I’m wondering if they’re using a Pultec filter plug-in on that track. That is one gorgeous fretless tone they’ve got going there.

 

[Gino t]

I was kind of obsessed in 2023 with collecting vintagey 12" guitar speakers and trying different cabs/small vs large condensor mikes/placements and my next steps were $$: pro level chan strip, one of my techs builds ribbon mikes, and another rabbithole into Logic Pro plugins but got distracted by day job and stuff like that.