Bass and pod

[johed]

I'm wondering if anyone is using a regular pod 2.0 to record bass guitar? I've tried but I get a rather lame sound, and quite a bit of noise too. If you have some settings that work for this, please let me know.

/Johed

[narcoman]

I've got bass pod pro and find the same thing a lot. It's not quite as good as micing up me good ol' ashdown rig, but by the time the bass is in the mix, for 90% of what we do here, it works superbly. As with amp farm, pods and all the other modellers, they're usually absolutely fine, but for that little bit extra knowledge of your own instruments and things, you find they never quite come up to scratch. But as i've already said, by the time you get to finishing stage they do the job as well as most listeners would ever know !!
cheers

[cornflakeofdeath]

I've used my POD for bass with mixed results. I can get some cool distortions, but the usually don't sound to great in the low end. Usually though thats kindof the effect I'm going for. Now that I think about it I bet if you blended the POD sound with a clean direct bass it could sound good.

[billybk1]

I use the POD 2.0 direct with my Fender Precision Bass using the Tube Preamp setting and a moderate 1.4:1 Compressor ratio for providing a good sounding bottom end. Once I've got the track down I can always insert DX/VST effect plugins as needed for any additional polishing or tweaking. I tend to like my bass rather dry though on most of my bass tracks.

Billy Buck

[johed]

Thanx for all your replys!

I was wondering something about the use of compressor: When I use the compressor and bass I get really anoying sounds of my hand sliding across the neck. Really awful sounds that I don't get otherwise. Maybe I have the wrong settings...

/Johed

[dave64o]

Well, I'm not sure if it's your settings or not. It may be, but then again maybe not.

What the compressor is doing is reducing your dynamic range, giving you less of a volume difference between your quietist passages and your loudest ones. If your finger scrapes are relatively quiet, when you apply a compressor those quieter passages get louder. In general, your noise floor gets raised, so background noise also gets louder and not just your actual "music".

Some things you could try are :
- Rolling off the highs a little to reduce the finger scrapes
- Use a parametric EQ to carve out the offending frequencies while leaving the rest intact
- Apply compression only to the lower frequencies, leaving the highs unaffected.