Today I will begin recording all of the bass guitar parts for my EP. I have written much about the bass tone of Chris Wolstenholme on this blog and hopefully my research will help me to craft recordings worthy of replicating the likes of Muse and also Rage Against the Machine.

My intention is for three of the tracks to have 3 or 4 different bass recordings. A clean channel, a distorted channel with an EHX Big Muff, a distorted channel with the Big Muff and a Boss BO-3 in order to try to replicate the tone of the Animato that Chris uses, as well as the Digitech Bass Synth Wah in order to create ‘Plug-In Baby’ and ‘Hysteria’ -esque tones, and in one of the tracks, a channel with an octave pedal set to -1. In my study of Wolstenholme’s bass recording I found that this was the typical setup, which I think at least partially explains how they managed to find such a dominating bass sound. I will record a clean signal through my bass amp, which unfortunately isn’t a Marshall, which Chris used, but I believe the pedals should make the bass amp tone slightly irrelevant in this context. The clean signal will be split to the amp, but also into a D/I signal, using an A/B pedal, which I will use to feed back the amplifier with pedals added later on in the session. This will mean that I can use the exact bass recording each time without needing to use multiple amps in different rooms. While Muse have the space and money to do this, I don’t. This should be an effective substitution. I’ll use my Overwater bass with humbucking pickups to replicate Chris’s sound, as detailed in ‘Pickups.’

For the final track, Antagonise, I intend to create a bass tone similar to that of Tim Commorford of Rage Against the Machine. For this I’ll switch bass guitar to my Overwater Jazz bass, similar in tone to Tim’s own Fender Jazz. Commorford’s bass tone doesn’t require anywhere near as much setup as that of Chris Wolstenholme although careful detail will be followed in order to get his sound correct. I’ll split the signal as above, with a clean tone coming from the amp and a D/I signal coming straight to the audio interface. The D/I will then be fed back through the amp with an overdrive pedal, to create a more aggressive tone for the chorus sections of the track.

I’ll be using a Shure SM57 to record the bass parts, which is a dynamic microphone, capable of handling the high SPLs that will need to be captured from the amplifier.

Once recorded, I’ll begin to mix the bass parts before the next stage which will be to record the guitars. In several Muse tracks from the first three albums, one or more of the bass tracks is panned in order to create a wider stereo field. While panning bass is not commonly found, it is an option for Muse due to having 3 or 4 bass tracks running at once. This allows the more distorted tones to find isolation and space to be heard. This is a technique I aim to try. Examples of this can be found in ‘Bliss’, ‘New Born’, and ‘Hyper Music’, all from ‘Origin of Symmetry.’