The next stage of my project is to mix the bass guitar. While most of the production on the bass (influenced by the bass on the four albums I’m studying) was done prior to and during the recording stage, I feel that the mixing is also a big part of achieving the bass guitar sounds I’m trying to replicate.
On Absolution, in the Sound on Sound interview I’ve linked below, Rich Costey noted that ‘as most arrangement decisions regarding the songs were made while recording, the overall modus operandi amounted to settling on a direction that would subsequently determine the nature of the overdubs and then the mix. This, in turn, ensured that the mixing process was relatively short and straightforward.’ While this is a philosophy I’ve tried to follow on all of the recording aspects of my project, there are a couple of highly characteristic pieces of production after the recording stages that make the bass guitar stand out.
The first, is the panning of certain bass tracks. Origin of Symmetry is strong evidence for this and in particular the track ‘Hyper Music’ (linked below) displays the way that the bass has been split and then panned to create a stereo image. As mentioned a lot throughout this blog, the band’s limited line-up instrumentally means that they have always tried to make the instruments they do have go further and by splitting the bass into three different tracks and then panning them, they successfully achieve this. I’ve followed a similar style so far in the mixing of my project and in three of the four tracks there are at least 3 different bass tracks, which will be panned accordingly. As mentioned in my other posts about bass guitar, one of these tracks will be entirely clean. This is because many distortion pedals lose some of their low-end when used with bass guitar. The Seymour Duncan link below goes further into this idea. Obviously as the bass’s primary job is to add low-end depth to a piece of music, adding a clean track underneath the distortions and then EQ’ing out frequencies over around 300Hz means that the bass retains it’s power in the low frequencies and the distortion tracks are free to create their tones which are generally more prominent in the mids and high-mids. This in turn creates a powerful set of bass tracks, able to dominate a piece of music where there’s a limited amount of other instruments.
The track in my EP with only two bass tracks, Antagonise, was intended to replicate the bass tone of Tim Commerford (Rage Against the Machine bassist) on Renegades. While the bass plays an important role on this album, it isn’t as dominating as the bass of Chris Wolstenholme on any of the Muse albums I’ve studied. That said, Rage Against the Machine are still a instrumentally limited band where all of the instruments are required to be heard in the mix. The track contains two bass tracks; the main, which is a clean recording of my bass amp with the bass set up to mimic a Commerford bass tone, and a track with a DI’d signal of the original recording which has been re-amped but this time with a Boss Bass Overdrive pedal added. The distorted bass sound on this album couldn’t be much more different to those used on the Muse records so when recording I left the EQ on the amp flat and tried to boost the lows on the Overdrive pedal. The bass tone on Renegades (best heard distorted on ‘Pistol Grip Pump’) is one that tries to boost the low-end tone of the bass, rather than adding a presence in the higher end of the EQ. This is unusual for a bass distortion track as often it’s an effect used to substitute for a second guitar, such as in Muse.
While there is some panning of the bass on this album, (see ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’), generally the bass guitar sits completely centre. For the track where I’m trying to replicate Commerford’s bass tone, I’ll therefore do the same.
In terms of compression, while I struggled to find concrete evidence of the type and amount of compression used by either Leckie or Costey on these four albums, I have found through listening that Costey seems to be more liberal than Leckie in terms of the amount of compression used on the bass guitar. See some of the bass tracks on Showbiz for evidence of this compared to the likes of ‘Hysteria’ from Absolution. I’ll be experimenting with compression in order to try and replicate what I can hear on these four albums.
To conclude I feel that with the research done on the bass guitar and the way it was produced in the albums I’m researching, I should be able to replicate the sound and style that the producers used.
http://www.musewiki.org/Rich_Costey:_Recording_Muse%27s_Absolution_(200312_Sound_on_Sound_article)