Holy cow! Dam man! Nice basses! And even nicer playing!!! Mate that is so legit bruz! nothing sloppy about any of that playing! Just wow man,those tones! So do you have a YouTube channel?do you do tutorials? Lol I’d love to know how to be able to get tones like that and further my techniques.
That was great to watch man,I appreciate that so much Mate
No worries mate, glad you liked. No I didn't have anything up on YouTube channel until yesterday! Not really gone in for the videoing my playing thing before to be fair and don't do any tutorials - not sure I'd be all that good a teacher!
Ah the endless 'pursuit of tone'. That's probably why I've been through so many basses, but kind of settled on Warwick Streamers in the last few years. For a good 5 year period at one point I only ever played Fender Precisions - still love them, but overall a Streamer LX can do more for me. I've always been into music production from about the age of 13 (and I'm 47 now) so I've always thought like 'how do I get the tone on this track etc?' Plus most of the bands I have played in have been covers bands playing a wide range of material, so I've tended to need 1 or 2 basses that can get a wide palette of tones. The other thing I like about Streamers is the playing comfort and they just seem to work for me. I love the sound of Stingrays and have owned a couple in the past but just never seemed to enjoy playing them live for some reason. My 'mock stingray' tone on a Streamer if I needed one would be bridge pickup with a bit of low-end boost and some compression to keep things tight - gets at least some of the way there.
Recording wise (and same for the video you saw) my signal path is bass into Radial DI box -15db pad, then into Tascam US-122 MK2 USB audio interface into PC. Then I use either IKM Ampltitube 4 or Toontrack EZ-Mix for tone presets like amp modelling, compression, EQ etc. There's plenty of presets for bass to play around with in these. The Ampeg SVX collection for Amplitube is pretty good. Generally what I've found for a good bass tone is often what is going on in the mid frequencies as this is where a lot of that character/growl whatever you want to call it tends to come through.
Technique wise I've just played a lot of styles over the years from rock, heavy alt rock, funk, pop, jazz and I've always had the ethos of playing the way that the song needs, rather than imposing one rigid bass playing style on everything. I'm most at home playing fingerstyle funk, but in some bands I've played solely with a pick and with a bit of dirt on my sound, because that's what worked best. I think we learn a lot more this way and we get to understand a bit more about tone and technique.
Anyway, that's my boring essay over with. This unfortunate Covid-19 lockdown has meant that the funk band I had recently formed (bass, guitar, drums & sax) can't play together, but we have done a bit of collaborative jamming by building up a couple of tracks sending on a mix to each other so that we can add our bits in DAW. Still keeps things going until such time as we can actually meet up and play in a stuffy rehearsal room!
Enough waffling from me. Take care and stay safe
