Welcome back @Ed! Glad you’re doing well and getting back to bass.
@howard What is an Exciter? I looked this up at one point and never found a good explanation other than “magic tone box”.
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Harmonic exciters generate higher harmonics of the input frequencies and blend them in to the sound.
You know the bright parts of the string tone that flatwounds take away? Exciters kind of do the opposite and add more. And then allow you to EQ it up and mix it in.
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Unless you want to spring for a plugin like Mixcheker Pro
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Or the latest nextgen pro mixing monitor headphones like Slate’s VSX, which is kind of like the Waza Air Bass, except the VSX is actually useful for mixing and mastering music. Instead of simulating bass amps and sounding good, it simulates all the super shitty listening environments people actually use 
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This would be cool but really I’m doing the covers for insta…
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Oh “buy another bass” - the answer to everything 
Actually though it’s probably a good idea to stick with the Rick or the T-bird for these recordings…
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Looks pretty cool ! Probably have to wait until I get my first 1000 subscribers though 
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Ooo sexy - but they’ll have to wait until I move into serious music production…
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Ahh missed that
Ok. Now that I actually read more than just the previous couple posts and understand you’re asking about recording and mixing, I have many comments. Welcome to my TED talk
Double tracking is a good first stop on making your bass sound bigger. But to make double tracking work you need to make the tracks different. Otherwise you are just adding amplitude. There’s already a track slider for that called “level” 
We want something more here. Here’s a few ideas (I have used all of these in covers I posted):
- Pan one bass take a bit to the left and one a little to the right. This is table stakes; always do this regardless of what else you do.
- The historical method: Play the track twice, once for each track. The little differences between takes will fatten everything up. Note: I consider this the worst method
- Detune one of the two by applying slight amounts (less than one cent) of pitch shift. This is easy and somewhat effective.
- Apply a subtle effect to one of the tracks. Some work better than others; modulation (chorus, phaser, etc) works best. A very common method is phase delay. This has an actual name (the Haas effect) and is a common stereo widening effect. You can even simulate this yourself in the DAW without adding effects, by simply zooming way in and dragging one of the tracks a few ms late.
- Just buy MDoubleTracker, it’s awesome
And a looooot of reading and learning online
This 100%. Audacity is not a DAW. It’s a nice music file editing tool with a lot of cool features, but it really breaks down for actual music production. Really recommend Reaper.
Absolutely. I actually just posted this image I ripped off* in another thread. It’s a typical EQ curve to shoot for. Basically I would recommend something like this as a starting point for EQing bass in any mix:
*it’s from this random blog post I found but you should read it, it’s good advice:
Out of all of that, the biggest takeaway is to trim the low end mud away. I actually usually start the rolloff on the High Pass filter around 50Hz myself. This is important for a real mix because all of the instruments accumulate cruft down there, but bass and the kick are the big offenders and can really make a mix muddy. For covers where you have already stripped away the bass this is something you’ll want to be careful with though as there’s less mud there to strip. But you still don’t want to overpower the kick.
I also don’t think I would have has large of a boost as he does at 4-6k; I usually do a slight high shelf starting around 1k-1.5k myself. Nor would I cut the low mids that much. But there’s a lot of instruments competing in that space from low to hi mids.
For the notch he puts in there to accent the kick - this is a very common technique (and you boost the kick’s EQ there in that range too). But there’s a better way I do with plugins that I will get to later.
This is all super solid advice to try. I’d suggest to mix it in with the other double-tracking caveats above.
Yep. There are some seriously awesome mixing and mastering tools. I love and highly recommend iZotope Neutron for this; it’s a track or bus oriented channel strip with some great features, including a really nice Adaptive EQ.
(This is a side note as it is way overkill for covers, but Adaptive EQ is a technique where the EQ intensity is parametric to an external signal. The default is amplitude; as a concrete example, where that guy’s diagram above has a notch for the kick, I could add an adaptive EQ cut so that the bass would get cut more there the louder it is but less for lower levels, to increase the tone when the levels are lower and only cut when it really needs to. That’s where it starts; it gets way more awesome than that. You can configure two tracks to work together and automatically unmask one of them to pop. But that’s pretty advanced.)
The absolute last thing anyone needs to do to stand out in a mix is buy a different instrument
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Good stuff there, @howard - thanks!
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If you are recording straight to mobile then I highly recommend the Roland go mixer pro or pro x. Portable and quality recording their 4cam app is pretty awesome you can record video directly with audio. My early covers were done on it.
The alternative is the Joyo Momix. Doing essentially the same thing with one feature that I absolutely love, usb type c instead of the micro usb. It offers stronger and more solid connections point. My Roland connector failed and had to be replaced. It’s also much cheaper than the pro x. Almost half the price.
JOYO MOMIX USB Audio Interface Stereo XLR Mixer for ios & usb-c Phone Powered Recording and Live Streaming with Musical Instruments Amazon.com
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I mucked around with adaptive eq for a while (sonnox dynamic eq plug in), but then I found basically my dream plugin for mixing and just ended up using it instead most of the time (multiple instances every mix basically)
I guess its a one trick adaptive eq but IMO if you use it subtly across multiple tracks in a mix it is magic
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Sweet, yeah, that’s exactly what Neutron does too; add Neutron to each track or bus and then select which you want to get out of the way and which you want to unmask. After that Neutron applies the adaptive EQ to both automatically. It’s awesome.
It’s really amazing how good plugins like these are.
There’s a lot you can do manually with sidechains and so on too, but this is so easy.
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yeah they are so good, especially for anyone with a ‘wall of sound’ mixing style like me
neutron looks kinda like the sonnox interface but seems to be more similar to trackspace from the pages explanation
I like trackspace as I just think of it as a 32 band side chain compressor which is what I always wanted…you can glue a mix together so well with it
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Hmmmmmm…(strokes chin) … that could be a definite possibility…
Nice 
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Whoa thanks @howard - time for some experimentation !
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