The bottom track is left as it is, you want the bottom to really be felt without trashing it to pieces with distortion. The trick is to separate the track into three separate, parallel tracks that will handle different parts of the bass’s frequency spectrum and create a blended tone.
However, for production use, just applying distortion to a bass track will muddy it up and it will mess with the distorted guitars.
In the documentary about Lemmy there’s a great clip where he shows the difference, just cranking up the gain on his amp. A regular bass guitar just plugged into an amp will be great for 70s disco music, but it won’t glue with distorted guitars. In metal, the bass is supposed to act like a third, tuned-down guitar, that glues the regular guitars together while at the same time providing bottom and rhythmic stability. To get a great metal bass tone (it’s always metal with me, I think you know that by now :-) ) you need to apply distortion. For this post I used an even simpler one with no settings at all (that sounds better than VB-1): 4front bass. An electric bass plugin like one of those I blogged about earlier.(Optional) A TubeScreamer sim like the TS808 by TSE.A virtual bass amp plugin like B.O.D 2.0 by The Serina Experiment.A DAW (a musical production application) like Reaper, Cubase, Logic, Protools etc.If you do have an electric bass, the tips here probably apply anyway as I’ve gotten them from the magnificent Systematic Mixing Guide e-book. Well, just like with drums, you can solve that using a virtual bass plugin in your DAW. Like me, a lot of home studio owners/bedroom guitarists don’t even own a physical, electric bass.
Following the popular post about how to get a great guitar tone from amp sims I’d now like to adress the challenge of bass.
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