Curious how ya'll feel about this... I've noticed that live most bass players dial in a lot of lows/sub lows that I never hear on recordings. There seems to be just enough low end on recorded basses to nicely warm the mix. Whereas live most bassist sound indistinct and muddy. Your thoughts?
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Recorded vs Live low end?
- Thread starter Grissle
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Three immediate thoughts:
1) soundguys...
2) it's a lot easier to reproduce massive lows with a massive PA system that most of us don't listen to recordings on.
3) reverb
It generally costs way way more to sound good live than it does to sound good when recording. For recording, you usually need just the bass or the bass and a small amp or DI, compressor etc.
But a good tone on a gig, plus or minus how big the room is, its acoustics, etc., requires a good amp. Something usually costing more than your bass or even two of your basses. If it's an outdoor gig, put a zero to the right of the cost of the above mentioned amp and... whew....
Also, the tube amp craze is a good way to spend a lot of money to sound really horrible and muddy even though it's often thought that they sound just fantastic. They're great when you're playing by yourself or even recording, but those of us who had to gig for real with monsters like Bassman's and Plush's and so on remember what they sounded like at an actual gig. Oh lordy, my ears are still ringing. Nowadays, fortunately, solid state amps are so good that there's no need to revisit that and they're cheaper besides.
Apart from that, it takes a little practice and skill to get a good tone on a gig. Sometimes there's either not enough time or not enough people at the gig for you to really care to do the setup of your tone. My gigging career was generally a combination of both why-bother-because-there's-no-one-here and generally being too poor to have decent sounding amps.
A related situation is when you're doing your own amplification and there's no PA/monitor setup. There you usually have to adjust for what's distinguishable on stage at the cost of what it sounds like offstage. That can be mitigated by throwing money at the amp, but that gets you back to the wheelbarrow-of-cash problem to getting that good sound.
But for recording, I was able to do about 80% of what I needed by just going straight into the board. Or a compressor pedal or something like that.
So that's generally why I found the difference so stark. It's just a matter of money, skill and practice with your equipment mostly...
LS
Then again, you said Bassmans and Plushes, so no wonder you had that funny but totally wrong impression of tube amps.
A lot depends on what kind of music and who you play with. Mixing for a live room is a lot different than mixing a record. I also agree w/ Jimmy here, Bassman and Kustom are not/were not the cream of the crop in terms of high volume bass rigs. Ampeg, Sunn and even Traynor are/were a lot beefier and generally not muddy unless you want them that way.
