Ok, so I lied. Glenn Fricker doesn’t care if he pisses you off or not. But for every sting he delivers, he counters with a salve and a bandage of healing knowledge, such as this How To video on what you can do to make the bass sound awesome in a heavy mix.
So while your bass player is picking his nose and warming up on the same strings that came on the bass when he bought it, you can be dialing in an ideal tone that will help the bass do its job in the mix. Most people don’t realize how strongly the bass factors into a metal/hardcore/rock mix, and how much it bolsters the guitar tone. If you were to take the bass out of a good metal mix, you would think the guitars sound thin and weak. As mixmaster Eyal Levi once said, “Guitar tone is really combination of guitar, bass, and kick drum.” That doesn’t mean that they have to play the same thing all at the same time all the time, but that they sonically work together to create the sound that rustles your jimmies.
Glenn talks about how a good heavy bass tone is all about doubling it up: a clean track and a dirty track (the same performance duplicated, not double tracked). He shows you how you don’t have to spend a fortune either: all the tones he gets are with freeware plugins and a $200 MIM Fender Jazz bass he got on Craigslist.
So if you play bass, or if you are a bass player, or if you are a recording engineer/producer who is re-recording all of the bass tracks after an exasperating day of recording the band’s friend who started playing last week, this video is for you.
