Getting good tone from a bass guitar in the recording studio requires specific techniques that differ from playing a live show. Understand the nuances of the bass sound in the studio with tips from Matt Noveskey of Blue October.
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Hi, I'm Matt Noveskey, I'm the Bass player for Blue October. I'm here today producing a band, Language Room, doing a record at Pedernales Studios here in Spicewood, Texas. Getting good tone from a bass guitar is, in my opinion, is much different than getting good tone out of a regular six-string electric guitar. Mainly because many bass players, most players in fact, play with their fingers. Some bass players, especially rock musicians like to play with the pick. You get a lot of, you get a lot of you know, the more dirty sound out of the strings if you play with the pick. Because you can hear every little noise that comes from the string when you really digging in with something like this. You have to learn to lay back and relax and know how to work with the bass with you fingers. Ninety nine percent of good tone is not your bass, it's not your amplifier, it's right here and it's in your hands. Some people, a lot of young bass players tend to get in the studio and think you know, that they need to show the same excitement, that they do, when they're playing live. And they sort of smack the bass. You can hear all this nasty noise coming out here, the string buzz, the fret buzz. You can hear every little nuance that you really don't want to capture on record. Having a good bass player in studio for a producer is the epitome of complete success. You can have, your session can literally be a quarter as long, if you have a decent bass player. I've had some sessions where I've sat in with inexperienced bass players and they don't have the right techniques. So you have to spend hours and hours, sort of, I guess, retraining. Because some people play it the same way that they would live. When you play bass in the studio, you don't want to play, if you don't want to dig in too much. You don't want to just attack the bass and play it, as though you're trying to be heard on a PA system. You want to play it with a really good sense of feel. And having a great bass player that knows how to do that already, is someone that can come in and spend much less time on the song. And get it done quickly and have it sound correct. This is Matt Noveskey, thanks a lot for joining me, this has been how to get good tone from the bass guitar recording in a studio.
