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[Barry Reynolds]

I just did a 32 channel live recording of my band using A&H SQ5 into Cubase 10.  This question is in the intersection of live sound and live recording.

I’m really happy with the raw tone except for the bass track.  It was tracked with a DI, no mic.  The tone is very clear but lacks some bottom boom that I was prefer in moderation.  In the show, the bass was huge.  In hindsight, perhaps I should have also mic’d the cabinet.   So far, EQ changes on the recorded track are not getting me totally there.

Any suggestions? 

I wonder if I can record an additional track by playing the bass DI track through the bass amp and mic that?  Then align and mix the two tracks?

I see Cubase has a “bass amp” plug in that I will try.

What else?  Thanks in advance.

[John Roberts {JR}]

There are studio effects that can richen bass tracks by adding low order harmonic distortion.

JR

[Eric Snodgrass]

Bass amp sim plug-ins do help in this situation. 
Waves has a bunch of tools on sale right now for this - Renaissance Bass, Eddie Kramer Bass Channel, JJP Bass Plugin, CLA Bass Plugin, and even the Manny Marroquin Tone Shaper.  You can probably demo any of these.

Plugin Alliance has some really nice amp sims.  They are pricey, but they do have one for free called bx_Rockrack V3 that should have some nice bass amp presets.  It's worth a look.  I think all of their plugins have 14-day demo windows. 

MeldaProduction has a plugin called MBassador that is worth a try on a demo basis that might be the right tool for your job.  (It's inexpensive too.)

[Dave Garoutte]

Or re-amp it with your bass player's rig and mic it.

[Douglas R. Allen]

I just did a 32 channel live recording of my band using A&H SQ5 into Cubase 10.  This question is in the intersection of live sound and live recording.

I’m really happy with the raw tone except for the bass track.  It was tracked with a DI, no mic.  The tone is very clear but lacks some bottom boom that I was prefer in moderation.  In the show, the bass was huge.  In hindsight, perhaps I should have also mic’d the cabinet.   So far, EQ changes on the recorded track are not getting me totally there.

Any suggestions? 

I wonder if I can record an additional track by playing the bass DI track through the bass amp and mic that?  Then align and mix the two tracks?

I see Cubase has a “bass amp” plug in that I will try.

What else?  Thanks in advance.

Hint it with some reverb. Try to match what you hear bleeding into the microphones from the room. The bass will stick out like a sore thumb until its in the same "space" as the rest of the mix. It doesn't have to be a lot but its worth it.

Douglas R. Allen


EDIT: I wanted to add experiment with the low cut and high cut and eq in the reverb on the bass and sneak the guitars in if needed. Not "Turn me loose" Loverboy kind of sound but enough to thickin it. The big bass could have been the room.

[Tim McCulloch]

What you are experiencing is making tracking decisions based on the sound of a monitoring rig (PA system) that is neither flat (magnitude response) nor linear.  You weren't mixing on what Robert Scovil calls "an honest system."

I like the re-amping idea and it's pretty painless.  The plug ins might be useful if the re-amp doesn't fully restore the tonality you're missing.

[Justice C. Bigler]

Pro Tip: make a copy of the recorded bass track, and use that to do your reamping/effects, whatever. Then you can switch back to the original and see where you have come from, so you don’t get too far from the original sound. Also you can mix the two together, as sometimes reamping looses some definition in the sound that the DI will have.

[Robert Lofgren]

Reamp either with a real amp or plugin with a bit of crunch/distortion and then blend the DI and reamp. Don’t forget to time align the two signals.

The DI will add the low end while the reamp add to the definition.

[Luke Geis]

Another trick is to simply copy the track and do your processing to each one for its specific role. In this case, one would be processed to make the mid and hi bands work while the second track is processed to make the low-end work. This allows you the ability to use different plugins and process the tracks differently to enhance the aspects you need from each one. I tend to find that low end is abused/overused in most live productions and improvements in headroom and crest factor can be improved by having less than you think you need. My biggest aha was when I tried making my recordings sound huge like they did at live shows and I couldn't make the post-production work. After realizing that I needed less low end to get the same impact and could make the mastering process work, I started employing that into my live sound. What I quickly found was that I had more headroom left and it didn't sound lacking in the low end either.

Case in point, it would not be uncommon for me to use a hi-pass filter on the kick drum up to as high as 50hz. For bass guitar, I will use a shelving filter or carve out a section for the kicks fundamental to punch through. If the bass guitar is a 4 string I will use a hi-pass up to as high as is needed to get the low end gack out even though it is beyond the fundamental, for 5 strings I will use a hi-pass set around 30-35hz just to save the headroom down where the pa can't reproduce that info anyway. I also use an RTA that reads my L/R out signal (pre-EQ and pre-send processing ) to get an idea of what I have going on. I like to see a pretty steep fall off around 50hz that is almost gone by 30hz. The rest I just want to be smooth with a gradual fall-off towards 16khz. Anything beyond 16khz, I don't really care about as long as it is still falling off.

I use Studio-One for most of my post-processing and if you set the RTA window for FFT it will show you a blue line that goes across the screen at an angle sloping down from the bass to the highs. If you keep the media ( within reason ) so it peaks along that line, you are pretty much at an ideal eq slope. Obviously deviations from that are for taste, practicality and crest factor improvement.

[Patrick Tracy]

Your options are reamp or sim. If you decide to go the sim route I'd recommend IK Multimedia Ampeg SV-X. If you go the reamp route you could use a hardware sim like the Ampeg SCR-DI.

Unless your DAW is not properly configured, or there's some inherent delay in the sim or external signal path (like a distant mic), there should be no issue with time alignment. Polarity would be good to check, especially if you combine the raw DI with the processed version.

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