Bass production tips & tricks

Cubase
1

This video shows my typical way of dealing with bass guitar in Cubase:

Any nice additional tips and tricks that you guys and girls have for producing bass (guitar) ?

Regards,
Maarten

2

This is so genre dependent that you cannot really give any tips and tricks without knowing the exact genre you doing.

3

Yes I can imagine that. The song in the video is a bit of a rock/pop/indie combination I guess.

4

Besides reverb and delay, I treat bass guitar and vocals very much the same.
I like to use multiple compressors that do only small amounts of compression each.
The deesser in Cubase is absolutely great at taming frequency ranges.
Use as many as needed, and you got a sort of dynamic EQ.
Distortion is great, but only in the mid band. Using distortion in the low band makes it sound thin, in the upper band it sounds like sand in your teeth.
Quadrafuzz2 is easy to use for this kind of mid band distortion, and can make the bass sound much deeper than it really is.
Sometimes all it takes is a Musicman Stingray with flatwounds into a SansAmp bass driver, instant country sound.

5

Thanks for your reply and great tips. I’m going to try them :grin:.
And interesting that you feel it is the same kind of treatment as a vocal (besides reverb and delay). I’ve never looked at it that way.

Regards,
Maarten