?Today was the day we were planning to finish up bass tracks for the project I had been producing for what will end up being close to 2 years. The bass player showed up early because we had 3 songs to do. I setup the usual rig. His Fender Jazz USA bass with brand new strings ran into a Redeemer impedance matcher into a Sansamp (for tonal control) into my Presonus M80.

Wait a minute! I couldn't find my Sansamp Bass DI!!! I looked around for about 10 minutes, but it was nowhere to be found. Time was wasting so I said “screw it!” and plugged the output of the Redeemer directly in the Presonus M80. Normally, I'd freak out if I didn't have any tonal control on the way in, but I was in for a surprise. The bass didn't need any tonal adjustments!!! The sound of the bass straight into my preamp was exactly the tone I was looking for! I was quite amazed.

There were a few times where the bass player would hit the strings too hard, too soft, or just didn't make a certain note sound distinct enough, but that was no big deal. I'm producing the project, so I just asked him to play these parts again with the necessary changes to give me what I need.

You may be wondering why I didn't use my Vintech preamp (Neve 1272 clone) on the bass. Well, for this project, I decided that I didn't want to run everything through the 1272. To my ears, the 1272 can get a little strong in the low mids if used on every track. Also, the bass player was a fan of the Guns N Roses bass sound and I wanted to take just the tiniest bit of low mid out of bass to avoid that low mid bump that the guitars will be getting.

The moral of the story is a great sounding bass played by a skilled player with solid instrument may not need any tonal adjustment at all!