D8 Skills #26 & D9 | Unit E | Recording JayTay | Session #2

Today, we recorded bass.

We set up two amps, so that we could record two different tones simultaneously, as the bassist's Rickenbacker has a stereo output. We had a bassy tone coming out the Fender amp miked with an Audix D6, and a trebly tone coming out the TC Electronics amp miked with an Audio Technica Pro 25.

We first used a jack to dual jack cable. There was a hum coming out both amps so we swapped it out for another, however there was now a different hum. I had an idea to use a powered headphone amp... so to go into the stereo input, and then take two mono outputs out. However, we managed to improve the signal to noise ratio dramatically just by adjusting the 'gain' and 'master' knobs on the amps themselves.

We positioned the Pro 25 on axis directly in the centre, and the Audix D6 off-centre because we only wanted a bassy tone from this one.

We also noticed something slightly off during this session, and that was the snare. We realised that the Top Snare, and Bottom Snare tracks were ever so slightly misaligned. They must not have been exactly equidistant from the contact point of the snare. We time aligned the tracks, and now it sounds a lot better; a lot stronger.