Preamp vs software

[Mazer]

Hey everyone,
I'm quite new to recording bass and all. My question is, let's say I have Presonus Audiobox, how would I get better tone, with an effects pedal, e.g. Sansamp BDDI or with some kind of software, when editing/mixing the recorded track?
Can I add effects with software too? If yes, can you name some good programs?
And last, can I record with only the bass plugged into the audio interface which is plugged to computer?

 

[f.c.geil]

Using actual pedals will yield better tones than software will, but you will have a greater variety available with software. You pays your money and makes your choice.

You can, indeed, use both, stacked. What many people prefer to do is to record the straight signal, then play it back through an effects board, recording that, too, then add software fx, then blend for the desired sound. ProTools is the industry standard for recording. They have light versions for amateurs on a budget, too.

Yes.

 

[seamonkey]

Using software will yield better tone than actual pedals, and you'll have a greater variety.

Yes, you can just record just your bass and add other tracks, loops, drums, etc.

Once you get your track into the digital domain, make a back up copy. You can copy digital to digital without build up of noise. Then add effects, processing, and automation, most all daws let you add these without affecting the track, then you can record it to another track.

A 1+ goes to Waves Bassrider. It is an automated volume control meant for bass. It is not the same as compression and limiting. You can still use compression for coloring and bass rider to ride the gain. Bass rider will ride the volume like a producer, only it can react much faster if you want it to.

Amplitube, and Ampeg SVX for familiar sounding amplifiers and cabinets. Amplitube Free is a great place to start.

Guitarampmodeling.com and kvraudio.com have pages and pages of advice on plugins.

 

[darius8]

I'll always suggest recording clean because you can always add effects afterwards.

 

[D.A.R.K.]

Using software will yield better tone than actual pedals, and you'll have a greater variety.

I want what you are smoking.
Besides losing much of your actual sound in conversion, digital effects do not react to dynamics in the same way actual voltage does, although that is what designers have been attempting to
recreate for many years. They are getting closer all the time.
But why emulate when you can have the real thing?
Cost is usually the answer. But you get what you pay for.
I use both heavily, came up through analog studios into the digital realm, and will use both. But one is just an emulation of the other, and that's the bottom line.

 

[TigerInATrance]

Your best bet is to get a good DI box and plug bass straight into it. Then DI into your interface. I find that you get a much better sound doing that vs. plugging the bass into the instrument in on an interface.

 

[seamonkey]

I want what you are smoking.
Besides losing much of your actual sound in conversion, digital effects do not react to dynamics in the same way actual voltage does, although that is what designers have been attempting to
recreate for many years. They are getting closer all the time.
But why emulate when you can have the real thing?
Cost is usually the answer. But you get what you pay for.
I use both heavily, came up through analog studios into the digital realm, and will use both. But one is just an emulation of the other, and that's the bottom line.

Amplitube, Revalver, Waves, ...
I smoke it all.

The way the digital effect responds to the numbers is up to the talent of the developer. The same algorithms can be used for analog and digital.

It's gone well beyond this, Try a linear phase EQ. It will be the best EQ you'll ever not hear. There are no phase artifacts and you can only do this in the digital domain.

There are always going to be some people that swear there's a big difference, it's just very doubtful this is real and not personal bias. I will never know because the only way to deliver music to the masses includes digital in major ways these days.

 

[darius8]

I use the Amplitube, Ampeg SVX and Guitar Rig stuff, they sound pretty good, I just don't record my main bass track with them.
In the Ampeg SVX, the SVT4pro is pretty nice but the effects that comes with it sucks donkey kong.

To really make these modeling software come to life is you got to have a computer with at least a 2.5 GHz CPU and 2 gigs of ram to take advantage of the HQ (high quality) modes settings. A fast cpu makes latency a non-issue.

 

[mrbell321]

Besides losing much of your actual sound in conversion, digital effects do not react to dynamics in the same way actual voltage does

I'm not sure what you mean by losing sound... but on the digital effects, there is no technical reason that any dynamics could not be recreated digitally. Perhaps you are using the wrong software?

 

[Mazer]

Will I get a much more horrible tone if I don't have a DI-box in between the instrument and an audio interface?

 

[mrbell321]

It probably depends on the specific interface... but I'd say it won't be "much more horrible", but it might be "noticeably different"

 

[DuraMorte]

Will I get a much more horrible tone if I don't have a DI-box in between the instrument and an audio interface?

That depends on several factors.
First: is your bass active or passive?
Second: is the interface's input switchable between instrument impedance and mic/line impedance?

The only situation where you really *need* a DI box is with a passive bass and a low-impedance (mic/line) input.
Active basses can deal with a much wider range of impedances, whereas a passive instrument needs a high-impedance input to sound it's best. That's what the DI box provides; a high impedance input for your bass, and a low impedance input to the interface.

 

[Mazer]

I have the squire vintage modified jazz bass, which probably is passive, and I plan on buying the presonus audiobox. Would I have to get a separate DI-box for the best sound?

 

[D.A.R.K.]

Amplitube, Revalver, Waves, ...
I smoke it all.

The way the digital effect responds to the numbers is up to the talent of the developer. The same algorithms can be used for analog and digital.

It's gone well beyond this, Try a linear phase EQ. It will be the best EQ you'll ever not hear. There are no phase artifacts and you can only do this in the digital domain.

There are always going to be some people that swear there's a big difference, it's just very doubtful this is real and not personal bias. I will never know because the only way to deliver music to the masses includes digital in major ways these days.

See, here's the thing- sometimes phasing occurrences between filter sets is the desired sound. And those plug ins are trying to emulate distortion factors inherent in analog circuits.
I have a full analog, and fully digital performance rigs.
Been working and buying on both sides of the fence for many years.
The way analog circuits react is far different from digital when it comes to dynamics. It's not personal bias, it's just the way it is. The mediums are different, although one is trying disparately to be the other.
If you can't hear it well, you are lucky and don't need to concern yourself with the issue.

 

[4Mal]

Personally I don't see it as an either / or proposition. If you have a clear idea of what you want tonally then developing that outside of software and capturing it, along with a dry track is ideal. Trouble is that often, things change and if what changes affects the low end then chances are good that the bass will have to change as well... which is why having the dry track helps. A re-amp box also helps but if you're counting shekels for the DI then ... If doesn't sound like budgetarily speaking, you are in an ideal circumstance though... you just have to accept that there will be compromises - there always are...

For a more direct resonse...
A Sans Amp ParaDriver is a box you might find very useful as it will produce some pretty nice bass tones and it is also clear enough to track guitars with. I would probably start there and investigate the plug in's that come with Cubase or whatever it is you are using as DAW software.

 

[D.A.R.K.]

I'm not sure what you mean by losing sound... but on the digital effects, there is no technical reason that any dynamics could not be recreated digitally. Perhaps you are using the wrong software?

Logic mainstage, ableton live, pro tools, etc. etc. etc.
The loss of information happens in conversion from analog to digital with any system. Sure, you can go up to 192k or even higher (i think creamware made a converter for 5 grand that goes double that)
but you still don't end up with all the harmonic information that a pedal will get from the instrument in the analog world, due to sampling rate limitations. So, you are working with a loss of bandwidth, just to get into the computer. And then to get out, there is another conversion.
These are degradations to the original sound. Not my opinion, but a given fact. The better the converter, higher sampling rate, the more of the original sound is captured. This alone puts a huge price on getting a system that will perform near analog quality. And there is latency. No digital rig has zero latency. If you can't tell, well, you are lucky and/ or have 10 grand in your rig (which wold cost you a fraction to just buy analog). Don't forget to time align all those overdub tracks, btw, by the amount of input latency.
I'm also talking about how pedals react to dynamics from the player. I have yet to find a digital plug in that reacts comparatively. ymmv of course, they are bringing digital modeling/ emulation closer to analog every day.
Ime, it's just not there yet.

 

[DuraMorte]

Logic mainstage, ableton live, pro tools, etc. etc. etc.
The loss of information happens in conversion from analog to digital with any system. Sure, you can go up to 192k or even higher (i think creamware made a converter for 5 grand that goes double that)
but you still don't end up with all the harmonic information that a pedal will get from the instrument in the analog world, due to sampling rate limitations. So, you are working with a loss of bandwidth, just to get into the computer. And then to get out, there is another conversion.
These are degradations to the original sound. Not my opinion, but a given fact. The better the converter, higher sampling rate, the more of the original sound is captured. This alone puts a huge price on getting a system that will perform near analog quality. And there is latency. No digital rig has zero latency. If you can't tell, well, you are lucky and/ or have 10 grand in your rig (which wold cost you a fraction to just buy analog). Don't forget to time align all those overdub tracks, btw, by the amount of input latency.
I'm also talking about how pedals react to dynamics from the player. I have yet to find a digital plug in that reacts comparatively. ymmv of course, they are bringing digital modeling/ emulation closer to analog every day.
Ime, it's just not there yet.

This post is full of misinformation, but to be fair, this is a difficult to grasp subject.
In reality, the 44.1kHz samplerate can accurately and perfectly reproduce all frequencies up to 22.05kHz. Considering that most people can't hear past about 15kHz, this samplerate is perfectly acceptable for music capture and reproduction purposes. There are no audible 'harmonics' in a bass guitar signal that go beyond 22kHz.
Just because there are $5k converters out there, doesn't mean they provide $5k worth of improvement.

 

[mrbell321]

I'm not saying that digital and analog don't sound different but that's a limitation of a particular setup, not of the technology. And now I know what you mean by "losing sound". There are compression techinques that some systems use that will lose information. The hope being that you don't miss it. There is a whole field of research on this and it's loosely and commonly called psycho-acoustics. And if you don't think analog has this problem... well... you're just wrong. Analog systems absolutely, 100% of the time lose information when transferring from one medium(a bass) to another(tape, whatever). If you want to state anything as a fact, that is it.
However, if you're recording w/ PCM, no loss compression, then you don't lose that data in the first place and at sufficient datarate, sampling, etc, it could easily be quantified that the digital recording and playback is more true to the original sound than analog.
But that's not really the point. As I said at the beginning, sure, they are different. And sometimes, you want the analog sound. Most people get that, in the guitar world, you generally don't want a clean, 100% accurate reproduction of the sound made by the strings. It doesn't sound very good that way. You want to add some color. And that's what all the pedals and stuff do.
But again, I will say that there is absolutely no set of pedals, filters, etc that could not be modeled and recreated in a computer. I'm not saying that everything has been done, or the stuff available sounds how you want it. I'm just saying it could be.

 

[D.A.R.K.]

This post is full of misinformation, but to be fair, this is a difficult to grasp subject.
In reality, the 44.1kHz samplerate can accurately and perfectly reproduce all frequencies up to 22.05kHz. Considering that most people can't hear past about 15kHz, this samplerate is perfectly acceptable for music capture and reproduction purposes. There are no audible 'harmonics' in a bass guitar signal that go beyond 22kHz.
Just because there are $5k converters out there, doesn't mean they provide $5k worth of improvement.

What is misinformation?
Please elaborate.
There are harmonics that are beyond our hearing range, but they effect the overall outcome and feel of the final sound.
Turn those harmonics into distortion, and it has an effect on the listener.
I have professional experience doing large scale concert sound for many years, and there is without a doubt a massive difference when clocking digital at different rates. That's why external clocking is an option on these desks!
The point of the discussion being mainly about the differences between analog and digital processing, however, and if you want to do a comparison with all things being equal, well, you have to make them equal first. Regardless of diminishing returns, the difference is still a difference.

 

[D.A.R.K.]

I'm not saying that digital and analog don't sound different but that's a limitation of a particular setup, not of the technology. And now I know what you mean by "losing sound". There are compression techinques that some systems use that will lose information. The hope being that you don't miss it. There is a whole field of research on this and it's loosely and commonly called psycho-acoustics. And if you don't think analog has this problem... well... you're just wrong. Analog systems absolutely, 100% of the time lose information when transferring from one medium(a bass) to another(tape, whatever). If you want to state anything as a fact, that is it.
However, if you're recording w/ PCM, no loss compression, then you don't lose that data in the first place and at sufficient datarate, sampling, etc, it could easily be quantified that the digital recording and playback is more true to the original sound than analog.
But that's not really the point. As I said at the beginning, sure, they are different. And sometimes, you want the analog sound. Most people get that, in the guitar world, you generally don't want a clean, 100% accurate reproduction of the sound made by the strings. It doesn't sound very good that way. You want to add some color. And that's what all the pedals and stuff do.
But again, I will say that there is absolutely no set of pedals, filters, etc that could not be modeled and recreated in a computer. I'm not saying that everything has been done, or the stuff available sounds how you want it. I'm just saying it could be.

I agree completely. But the major difference is that digital conversion truncates band width in a way analog does not,
and the way in which it does is not, imho, very musical.
Tape has huge limitations, but the process also produces it's roll off without introducing artifacts that digital conversion does.
And yes, you can model stuff, throw thousands of man hours and dollars into it, or just use a hardware pedal. But that's the down side to development. I can't wait for my plug-ins to react and sound as good as my hardware.