Wow, thanks! Those are awesome. I never thought of youtube; I assumed that was all video.
A few observations:
Geddy has said in interviews that he played the Fender on everything but Red Barchetta and The Camera Eye. You can clearly hear a big difference between the Fender and the Rick on those two tracks. The Rick has much more of a boxy midrange sound, less bottom, and also more distortion. The Fender has more bottom for sure. Hes said that is why he gave up the Rick eventually.
Much like with the other solo bass tracks Ive heard, the bass tone is less impressive on its own. But when it is in the whole mix, and after the whole mix is mastered, wow, Moving Pictures has some of the best bass sounds ever in my opinion. So it is very interesting to hear the raw underlying bass tone.
Im sure part of the equation is also that these are extracted from the master tapes, so there may have been additional processing on the tracks as well as mastering of the entire mix. Also we are hearing the master tracks by way of RockBand rips by way of youtube downloads. So there may well be some loss of fidelity there but I suspect that this is pretty much the real thing.
Then there is the fact that you can clearly hear the notes Geddy is/is not playing. There are little nuances and sounds that are not evident in the final recording. Hearing this makes it seem more like it was played by a human!
This was fantastic. Im now on a quest to hear as much of this isolated bass stuff as I can. I heard the Jamerson tracks a while back and it was a similarly eye-opening experience. But this has been even bigger since I am such a fan of the bass on this album.
