Dialing in the MEANEST bass tone ever!!!

hey there everybody this is christian kohler and i'm back with another mix lab today i want to talk about bass guitar i want to show you how i dial in a great sounding brutal modern bass tone awesome right and there are two or actually three things that matter that are important to me first thing is what i call the dangle dangle dangle if you have ever worked with me you know what that is with dangle dangle i mean yeah the mid bite the attack of the bass guitar and you should check your di tracks if they have the dangle or not you can even unplug the the the base the cable and listen to the acoustic bass if it has enough attack high end and mid bite that is very important otherwise you're not going to get there so today i'm gonna use a lot of basic plugins so if you're trying this at home and it sounds nothing like what i do i'm pretty sure uh you should revisit your di track second thing is low end i want a solid low end the low end is so important it's more functional it's not so much about the sound because it will make your mix sound fat and no matter how low you tune your guitars those distorted guitars will never have the clean and solid low end of a bass guitar so that is once again very important the third thing is kind of optional it's more a character thing and a matter of taste but very often i want to give the bass guitar the grind a guitar-like grind high gain grind and today i'm going to use three tracks one for the dangle one for the low end and one for the grind that sounds amazing right one for the dangle one for the low end one for the grind so let's do this let's head over to cubase and get started so let's first have a listen to the riff that i recorded for this video sounds like this [Music] [Music] so this is very simple we have program drums and one guitar on the left one guitar on the right and the bass the guitars were recorded with a orange rocker verb over there perhaps you can see it but let's concentrate on the bass so let's have a listen to our gi track sounds like this [Music] sounds pretty good but i have to apologize because the strings were already quite old and i was too lazy to you know to get new strings so usually i want a little more high end here but it works i could have also tuned it a little better i'm sorry for that anyway that's our diy track first we want our main sound we want the dangle let me show you what i did here i start by using a compressor and that compressor is not doing much [Music] so it's perhaps 2 db of compression and the reason for this is i want to get the base under control before i hit any distortion and this helps all right next thing is this plug-in that i've also used in my aborted nail the mix session and this is the waves cla base and i really like this plug-in for pre-shaping the base i'm actually using pretty extreme settings here today but let's just turn it on and see what happens [Music] so as you can hear it takes away that di feel of the bass track which helps so let's turn this off and see what i'm doing here first of all i'm adding some yeah some high end i think i'm just doing this because the strings are old next thing is compression and it's actually pretty compressed table listen it sounds a little over compressed but it works in the mix next thing is something that is optional i sometimes do this sometimes i don't depends on the tuning on on the mix and on the bass di this is the sub-harmonic exciter or whatever you call it let's go [Music] adding a lot of low end and finally the growl have a listen [Music] and that removes the di feel so yeah now the track is just a little more prepared next thing i'm hitting is a dark glass plug-in and i'm using the the vintage version here because it's giving me that that ampec amp feel in a way i'm not using a lot of the distortion here it looks like i'm using a lot but i'm actually at -7 at the input here and i'm not using the cabinet so it's just the pedal let's have a listen so as you can hear this sounds a lot more like a real amp now so the cla removed that the eye feel and this one is giving me yeah an ampec feel sounds like a real bass now and i'm trying not to distort the low end [Music] i don't want something like this or this so i'm just pushing the highs and mids here next thing is a eq i'm not doing a lot here i'm just adding a low cut at 30 hertz pretty steep and some bite up here and finally i'm hitting another compressor with exactly the same settings like the first one again just a few db i think [Music] something like 3db sounds pretty good so let's have a listen to the mix with just that track [Music] that sounds nice already but it's a little out of control in a way and if i put the base to the right of volume we still don't have enough solid low end and this is where we add our second track this one here again i just copied the di track [Music] this time we're adding a high cut this one is at 180 hertz next thing is another compressor so this one is doing a lot more something like 60b of compression we just want to make sure there's no movement there anymore just be careful with the release if it's too fast you can run into distortion and you don't want that you want that track to stay clean next thing is optional and that is our base from waves sometimes i use that sometimes not sounds like this it's at 80 hertz so just adding some more audible low end in a way and finally another compressor let's have a listen all right so let's check out our first our main base track and then we will add the low end track [Music] as you can hear this makes the low end so much fatter and solid i love it and since we're not using a cab emulation here or a real cab those two tracks should be in phase but it always makes sense to check the face between them all right okay so now we got the dangle dangle and we got the low end let's continue the next thing i want to do is add grind guitar like grind so let's go back to audio eye track and this time i'm gonna use this plugin here which is basically just a hardware insert so i can send it to a real amp and what i'm using is this brunetti amp over there and i'm using the second channel so it's not the high gain channel let's have a listen nice and evil you can see there's one parameter here in german it's called fatsugurung which will compensate the delay you add by sending the signal to a real amp through the d a converters through the amp the cab the air to the microphone and through the ad converter back into cubase cubase was suggesting something like 1.8 let's have a listen [Music] but i manually adjusted it and ended up at 1 which sounded better to my ears because 1.8 sounded kind of honky that sounds good to me now let's solo the amp track one more time what i always do is i will add a low cut like this because you don't want to push too much bass frequencies into the guitar amp we don't need the low end from the guitar amp and it's just gonna sound farty you know so let's check this out [Applause] [Music] and one more really interesting thing you can do here is adding another eq band to push the amp into distortion at certain frequencies usually 1k is pretty pretty nice let's try this [Music] that sounds good to me so let's reamp that track i will add a high cut and another 1k you know mid boost to that track let's have a listen just to remove some nasty frequencies up there and to further more push the mids the next thing you want to do is check the low end because we don't need a lot of low end from this track one thing you could do simply add a low cut and remove the loads here i did something more sophisticated i'm using this plug-in which is called track spacer from waves factory and this is a ducking plug-in more or less so you can sidechain it and it is chained from the main base track so in its default settings it sounds like this [Music] so the main bass track is docking our amp track but the cool thing about this plug-in is that you can actually remove some frequencies that you don't want to be ducked let's do this [Music] fantastic right so now just the low end is ducked and the rest stays untouched i really like that plugin for this purpose that sounds great together and uh let's just mix in the amp track now and see how brutal we want to make it let's go [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so that sounds great and i want to recommend that three fader method to you because it makes your bass mix so flexible you have the dangled angle channel for a standard modern metal bass tone you have the low end fader and you have the grind channel so depending on how the bass has to function in a mix you can ride those faders so when the bass is playing alone or whenever there's a really dirty and heavy part you crank that grind fader when you need more low end you crank the other one very flexible so next time you record bass try that see you next time thanks for watching bye bye

Channel: URM Academy

Views: 58,929

Keywords: joey sturgis, eyal levi, joel wanasek, urm academy, nail the mix, mixing metal, kristian kohle, kohlekeller studio, metal guitar tone, metal bass tone, best metal guitar tone, bass distortion, mixing metal bass

Id: _STnZmsMr-Y

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020