Getting a great bass tone

In this tutorial you'll learn how to get a great sound for your bass, straight from your audio interface

In a previous tutorial I talked about some of the benefits of recording a clean bassline through an audio interface. It certainly cuts down on the amount of equipment that you'll need to record from home. And now, music production technology is easily at a level where listeners would never even be able to tell whether you've recorded with a bunch of effects pedals and an amp in a studio, or you've just emulated the effects using plugins which is what we're going to focus on in this month's tutorial.

If you're anything like me, you'll have a home studio setup with several different instruments at the ready. I've scaled down on certain things over time as I'm not playing live for the foreseeable, so amplifiers were the first to go allowing me to make space. I can still put in a recorded performance, just as I would as a studio guest, but I'm in total control of shaping the clean recording thanks to everything that amp emulation now has to offer. Want some flange or fuzz on that bass? Go ahead. Need it to growl? No problem at all.

I'll walk you through how to achieve the most authentic, or just the most appealing, bass tones for a variety of different amp/cab types to help musicians working in various different genres. I'm primarily a Logic Pro X user, but the principles discussed here can just as easily be applied to any amp modulation plugins. So, let's get stuck in...

Step by step

Create a great bass tone with stock plugins

1 First things first, record your pass parts into Logic. You can use Logic's input monitor to check your levels are coming out OK. You don't want your signal to be too hot (have too much gain) or too low (meaning that when you raise the level in the DAW you'll also add noise).