I will tell you for free that a great recording bass is a true rarity, as a couple of previous posts have suggested.
What you don't want or need for DI recording (and bass usually is and should be recorded direct) is a bass with active circuitry you can't bypass.
I have six or seven MIA Precisions, old and new, I use for recording and don't consider any of them ideal for the job because of their individual sonic idiosyncrasies, but they are all good enough.
What you want is a quiet, passive bass -- and that's what a Precision is. I've read that some 80% of history's recorded electric basses have been Precisions, but that seems a bit high and there are other options. The Precision's virtue in the analog studio was that it didn't require much treatment.
In modern recording, the object is to get a clean, neutral, artifact-free, error-free transduction of a bass performance digitally tracked for mix treatment in the box, where it can be made into anything imaginable by the mix engineer and producer. The closer you get to that ideal raw track the better, and you can do it with any number of basses. You are no longer as limited by the native tone of the bass.
I have a lot of basses, but the one that is the cleanest, most even and solid for recording is a passive Music Man with big flats, of all things.
Good luck!
What you don't want or need for DI recording (and bass usually is and should be recorded direct) is a bass with active circuitry you can't bypass.
I have six or seven MIA Precisions, old and new, I use for recording and don't consider any of them ideal for the job because of their individual sonic idiosyncrasies, but they are all good enough.
What you want is a quiet, passive bass -- and that's what a Precision is. I've read that some 80% of history's recorded electric basses have been Precisions, but that seems a bit high and there are other options. The Precision's virtue in the analog studio was that it didn't require much treatment.
In modern recording, the object is to get a clean, neutral, artifact-free, error-free transduction of a bass performance digitally tracked for mix treatment in the box, where it can be made into anything imaginable by the mix engineer and producer. The closer you get to that ideal raw track the better, and you can do it with any number of basses. You are no longer as limited by the native tone of the bass.
I have a lot of basses, but the one that is the cleanest, most even and solid for recording is a passive Music Man with big flats, of all things.
Good luck!
