Mixed sound versus solo sound

[the_stoot64]

I do a lot of home recordings and find it quite easy to get bass to sit in a mix, but I've never been happy with the bass sound by itself. If there is a solo bass passage or a few lead in notes at the beginning of a song my bass sounds are far more amateur sounding than everything else.

Things I've tried:
DI sound
Mic'd SS bass amp
Mic'd Valve bass amp
Different mics
Mixing different sound sources
Double tracking
Various EQ, pre-amp, and compressor hardware and plugins

Does anyone have any tips or ideas of things to try?

 

[Emanuel Apascaritei]

If there is a solo bass passage or a few lead in notes at the beginning of a song my bass sounds are far more amateur sounding than everything else.

Maybe a sound clip will help. What you understand by amateur sounding? Maybe is has to do with the way you approach those solo notes....

 

[Michael4bass]

Try automating the eq for the solo parts.

Bassically, Michael

 

[the_stoot64]

Maybe a sound clip will help. What you understand by amateur sounding? Maybe is has to do with the way you approach those solo notes....

This is a short sample where I've solo'd the bass in a song. It's a bit buzzy as I'd normally work harder to play cleaner if it were meant to be solo'd.
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[the_stoot64]

Try automating the eq for the solo parts.

Bassically, Michael

That's what I thought I should do but have never found any EQ setting that works.

 

[Emanuel Apascaritei]

This is a short sample where I've solo'd the bass in a song. It's a bit buzzy as I'd normally work harder to play cleaner if it were meant to be solo'd.
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Nice playing. Try to lock the frequency of the clik noises with a notch filter and bring them down. it´s in between 1 to 2.5 kHz. Maybe this will do it.

Also I have noticed you have automated the solo notes by bring them up a bit. I would leave them at the same volume as when with all instruments.

Sounds good to me.

 

[the_stoot64]

Nice playing. Try to lock the frequency of the clik noises with a notch filter and bring them down. it´s in between 1 to 2.5 kHz. Maybe this will do it.

Also I have noticed you have automated the solo notes by bring them up a bit. I would leave them at the same volume as when with all instruments.

Sounds good to me.

I didn't automate the bass, that's probably more of a compression thing on the whole project. Thanks for your other input

 

[Whousedtoplay]

I do a lot of home recordings and find it quite easy to get bass to sit in a mix, but I've never been happy with the bass sound by itself. If there is a solo bass passage or a few lead in notes at the beginning of a song my bass sounds are far more amateur sounding than everything else.

Instead of spending hours trying to resolve your "issue", I would record your bass intro - or other SOLOING PARTS - on a separate track/s and would work on the EQ and other effects just to have, more or less, the bass tone that sound OK by itself.
The rest of your bass-line played with other instruments could stay on a different track.
It would allow you to work on your bass sound in the mix with other instruments.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Instead of spending hours trying to resolve your "issue", I would record your bass intro - or other SOLOING PARTS - on a separate track/s and would work on the EQ and other effects just to have, more or less, the bass tone that sound OK by itself.

Sometimes a good effect (depends on many factors) is to keep the main track for a bigger sound with double tracked bass.

 

[taylor16]

I've always found that my favorite tones in a mix sound awful on their own...

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Hearing some of the solo tracks from famous songs that are doing the rounds certainly helps you understand how a rough-sounding solo sound works in context. Plus it sometimes indicates what will be lost in the mix (fret noise, etc).

 

[BazzTard]

that's why we have PEDALS ! add a bit of chorus or fuzz, OR BOTH !

 

[Shabz]

a few thoughts/ideas from me:
-like taylor says above a good mix bass sound can be bad solod, i think this is especially true of muted/muffled style tones
-bass doesnt usually want reverbs/delays but when it's out on it own you should apply a little something to make it sound less flat
-To me your playing seems a little off for the faster part of the lick, it seems to lag a bit and doesnt sound particularly confident in terms of timing
-A lot of great lead-style lines for any instrument can be totally murdered by just playing straight notes, look for ways to inject some extra feeling using dynamics/vibrato/note approaches

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Having listened to the clip my two comments are:

1. I don't like the way the guitar fades in as it seems jarring on the timing, which then makes it seem like you played out of time in the intro.

2. It sounds like you have moderately high action but are playing rather hard. Lower action and playing more gently might smooth out the sound. I may be wrong on the action, though, but that's the impression I get from when you cut notes short with the way the fret buzz on lift off comes in. You may not want to play live with such a low action, of course, and that's fine.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Following on from that, the way you play has great punch under the guitars, so that's a connundrum, but some compression that emphasises the punch with the lighter playing style might work.

I'm wearing Sennheiser HD465s when listening, which boost bass a bit, but the bass under the guitar parts is a little boomy, although in general the timbre isn't bad at all for the intro with these cans on. I'd suggest cleaning up the boominess under the guitars if you don't want to rerecord anything. Or I could find my mixing headphones and listen again, but some people might be using consumer 'bass flattering' headphones to listen on, which is why I have a pair around for general listening and checking mixes.

 

[Nephilymbass]

I definetly like different pre amps for different situations. I've had this same issue and because of it it seems like I'm wanting to use more preamps every time I do a big recording. We go back in the studio in September and my plan this time is to use my stingray and 4 signals. So we'll see how it goes.

1 sans amp RBI (used on our last album, I think it works great with a wall of hi gain guitars the lows sit nicely in the mix, there's somewhat of a scoop in the mids That allows the low end of the guitars to sound great, and the lows are really deep and the attack cut through really well.

2 swr 750x xlr. I used this for a previous album, didn't like it on parts with the wall of guitars as much because of the way the bass sat in the mix, it doesn't have the super low frequency response of the RBI so it fought with the low end of the drop tuned dirty guitars more. but liked it more at times, like parts with clean guitars where inwanted a cleaner bass tone

3 sans amp gt2. I use this set really dirty with the switches on sans amp/hi gain/california. More of a guitar amp type sound but it's cool for being able to mix in dirt after the fact instead recording with normal dirt pedals where once it's tracked you basically have to live with it.

4 dry DI. I've always recorded a dry DI just incase, sometimes it gets blended in a little sometimes it doesn't.

May seem crazy but really the RBI has a dry thru to feed the gt2 and a wet and dry xlr so it takes care of routing the signal for 3 of them. The swr im hoping to have it worked out so I know for sure the parts I want to use it on as we continue pre production. Right now we have two songs ready to go and 3 more still works in progress. We're only recording 5 songs and the studio is local so I'm not as worried about being pressed for time. Just hoping it all comes together and isn't a huge pain to edit and mix. We play simple music, normally I can knock out tracking a full legth album in about an hour with minimal retakes. But I always feel like I wish I'd have spent more time on tones so this time it's more of a priority.