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Old 12-15-2008, 04:53 PM   #91
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by junioreq View Post
The thing I notice most about pro recordings is that instruments have their own space in the stereo spectrum. You had been talking about bass guitar. One thing I haven't seemed to get yet is how to get the bass to take up a narrower slice of the pie in that field. I hear these recordings where the bass is quite powerful and yet sits in such a small area dead center, almost coming from above.

As I lay a bass, it seems a little wider and unfocused. Guess that would be a good word. Unfocused. Kinda blurred. What is actually giving these instruments this pinpoint position in the whole stereo field?
I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but here are some things to think about for now:

- Instruments that are panned dead center are identical to instruments cloned and panned both hard right and hard left. On a good, properly-positioned speaker setup, there should be three specifically identifiable "cardinal points": hard left, hard right, and the "phantom center." Everything else tends to be a blurry and variable no-man's land, which is fine, it just is what it is. But you should be able to hear instruments or content coming from those three distinct locations if you close your eyes-- it should basically sound like there are three speakers, with stuff in-between (this is the system setup, not necessarily the pan position).

Assuming you have a good monitor setup where you can hear the three cardinal points using test tones or reference CDs or whatever, why is it that some instruments panned center seem offset, or shifty, or seem to come from that vague no man's land? One common reason is different masking effects on the left and right. E.g., if you have a guitar in the right speaker and a piano in the left and the bass dead center, the guitar is going to be masking and covering some parts of the bass sound, and the piano is going to be masking and covering some other parts. If you have something else dead-center (like a full-spectrum rock vocal or lead part), then that is going to be masking some other parts of the bass sound, maybe most of the upper-midrange articulation. So different parts of the bass sound are going to poke through wherever they can find room and the whole effect might be a somewhat de-localized sound, which is neither good nor bad, just a thing to deal with. Everything affects everything, and frequency management of different instruments and different parts of the stereo spectrum is huge.

- Playing technique. Some of the most highly-valued studio musicians in the world are bass players who can generate "hit bass," which usually has almost nothing to do with the kinds of acrobatic technical virtuosity required of guitar players or session vocalists. These hitmakers frequently play pretty simple lines, but they control the dynamics, note duration, and tonal quality to get just the right "feeling" that beds the song and complements the drums.

One of the biggest differences between a really good bassist and a guitar player playing bass is that the bass player will tend to play with a much lighter touch while still controlling the dynamics. Guitar, especially electric guitar, is an instrument that was made to played loud. Even with "clean" guitar sounds, the amplification is typically a very crude, primitive, soviet-era system that is meant to overload and saturate on the input stages, the output stages, and at the speaker itself. This is what gives that rich harmonic "fire" and expressiveness to electric guitar. It also compresses the signal and delivers articulate, emotional "oomph" that stays at a fairly consistent level but just "sounds" louder when you pick harder.

If you take the same approach to bass, and pound the hell out of the strings, playing with the kind of expressive, loosey-goosey timing that many guitar players do, the sound is apt to overload the pickups, the input stages (preamps), and everything else, producing the same kind of dull, farty, obnoxious-sounding lows that come from overloading cheap speakers.

Bass needs a lot of headroom and power. It requires high-wattage amplification (ever notice how a 50-watt guitar needs a 1,000-watt bass amp to keep up?), which translates into good, adequately-powered monitors so that you can hear what you're playing clearly and powerfully without saturating the signal, and it requires lots of clean input amplification, which means playing with a lighter touch and rolling off your preamp input levels to insure that you're not pushing them too hard. Just because your soundcard's "clip" LED doesn't come on until you pin the peak meters doesn't mean that it has adequately-sized transformers to handle massive steady-state basslines right up to 0dBFS. The AD converters might not "clip" until long after the analog preamp has become voltage-starved and starts to fart out from current overload (Notice how everything seems to come back to level-matched listening comparisons, EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, including how you set your input levels? Golden ears in one easy step). If you've been recording bass with hard-picked notes on an inexpensive starter bass plugged into an inexpensive prosumer interface, trying backing the gain down and playing the notes very lightly and see if clarity, focus, and power doesn't improve dramatically. Gain-staging is a big topic for a later post, but like everything else, all you really need is ears.

- This might sound obvious, but use fresh strings and a good instrument. Bass strings sadly wear out quickly, and unless you're James Jamerson (the greatest bass player who ever lived, but not someone most people are equipped to emulate), old strings are even worse for bass than guitar, while also being more expensive. You can boil old strings in water with a little white vinegar to restore some life if cash is tight. A decent bass doesn't have to be all that expensive, but the pickup configuration and general sound of the instrument should complement the kind of music you do. A fat, funky, burpy-sounding P-bass is not going to sound appropriate in a nu-metal band, and a deep, clackety, growly, heavy-body bass with EMGs might have a hard time fitting into mellow blues-rock ballads.

-Arrangement and performance. This is a topic for another thread, but a bass is not just a four-string guitar. Whatever instrument is playing the lowest note sets the tonal foundation for the whole song. If the bass plays a fast run up to the seventh, then the whole band sounds like it just played a fast run up to the seventh. That's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, just something to be aware of. If the bass plays with a loose, expressive timing, the whole band can sound lurchy and out-of-step. If the bass plays tight, sensitive timing in synch with the drums, then it sets the solid foundation that frees up the lead instruments to play expressively. The bass is the most powerful instrument, literally, and with great power comes great responsibility, in the words of the famous audio engineer Uncle Ben (from Spider-man, not the rice guy). If the bass line is "off" (which is a purely subjective judgment), then the whole thing just doesn't sound or feel right. This is purely a "feel" thing, it does not necessarily mean that every note is plucked right on a drum beat. In fact, the nature of the bass is such that slightly dragging or pushing the beat often produces the best results, because bass waves are slower to develop and interact in funny ways. But it has a big effect on gluing the whole sound together.

Last edited by yep; 12-15-2008 at 04:56 PM.
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