Tone & Pickup Blending for Recording

[NordLead]

Guitarist here. Have a Corvette $$ 4-stringer with passive humbuckers to record some bass lines with. I have some pretty elementary questions since I'm not really a bassist. I record metal music and the questions are in relation to the recorded tone.

1) Is it probably better to run the tone knob at 100% (more trebly) like I do all of my guitars? Probably easier to EQ the top end down a bit rather than boost.

2) The neck and bridge pickups have a push/pull knob with pulled (up) position being parallel. I've always left them down, which is in series, not even knowing they were push/pull until recently (doh!). Is series usually preferred?

3) On guitars the neck pickup is darker than the bridge pickup and I run the guitar's bridge pickup 99.9% of the time. This bass has two volumes for each respective pickup and I'm not sure how most people would set these. What I currently do is run the bridge wide open and bring up the neck just a bit. Any advice?

I'm recording metal, so keep that in mind.

 

[ctmullins]

1. Yep, that’s what I would do, especially with a passive instrument. I agree that it’s easier to remove highs in the desk EQ than try and create them.
2. Series will be louder and fuller sounding. Parallel will have more upper-frequency content. Because you’re recording, the difference in signal level shouldn’t be a problem. Use whichever sounds better to you.
3. Again, turn the knobs until they sound good. Running both pickups at the same volume on a passive bass will result in the pickups interacting with each other in a way that removes some midrange. This is neither good nor bad; it’s just another available sound. Many people avoid that, and attenuate one pickup relative to the other. The knobs are there to provide options, so spend a bit of time twisting them to see how they affect the tone.

 

[XLunacy]

Will add to @ctmullins's excellent answer that you really ought to fiddle with the knobs in the context of a full mix and not just in isolation.
Also, I would personally really go and listen to isolated bass tracks of songs from similar kinds of metal music, just to have a rough idea of what works and how the tracks merge with the rest of the mix in the full songs.