MNEMIC studio blog: BASS

So happy we are all done with guitars for 15 songs, its been really heavy, heavy as in sitting hours and hours recording to perfection, listening and being focused. I totally forgot how much work there is when layering track after track, bouncing and listening. 2 years ago we actually got really tiered of spending hours and hours in the rehearsal and made the smart move of investing in studio equippement for everyone in the band, and voila, everyone in the band works with ProTools. We are probably the last band on earth to have done this, but in the end, and as you probably know, it makes the whole process easier, as we can work whenever and wherever we want.

Well, moving on to the bass parts, today we setup some of the new gear we got in from our friends at T.C. Electronic. Again we are trying to go different ways, as we always recorded with Ampeg but now its time to try something else.

We setup both the Ampeg stack along side T.C.’s RebelHead 450 bass amp for comparison, and came quickly to the conclusion that the RH450 had a much more raw but clear sound than the Ampeg. As all digital processor units are trying to emulate tube based amps and analog units in general, we must say the DSP took us by surprise in the RH450. By comparing the two we quickly decided to try out the RH450, and it did give us a more clear sound but a very thick sound, which was satisfactory to record. So we trashed the Ampeg, and we’ll go digital all the way, as for the basslines.

The RH450 is quite cool, it even has a build-in chromatic tuner, the knobs on the interface are the basic tone-controls that every amp has, but the cool thing about it is that they are also semi-parametric, in which its possible to change where the tone-controls grab your bass sound. More importantly, as all digital processor units, it emulates a tube-amp, a nice warm tube sound, and without kissing too much ass to our beloved sponsors, we are actually and honestly quite impressed by this piece of wonderful hardware that we are using for the “Sons of The System”.

We have begun tracking the first song, this one is called “Climbing Towards Stars”, not much to say about it other than its mid-tempo, heavy, and all in F# more or less.. so yes, its heavy. Should Tomas nail 15 songs in 2-3 days, he will definitely come out as a hero.