Real Songs That Use Bass Effects

Thanks!

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Phaser or low rate Chorus (either would work) plus lots of reverb:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TCvpHECHYY

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Here is a short video on how to sound like Pino as he played on one of the Paul Young classics… this one involves a chorus:

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And some examples of fretless and octaver:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpjgLa1Ph-E

In the end, the cool thing about effects is that you don’t need to use them ALL the time, but they can be fun to explore and use SOME of the time :wink:

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And here is a bit of flanger on Tony Levin’s bass - some 70s souljazz (by the way, Steve Gadd is killing it on drums here):

Point here: effects also don’t need to be “in your face” all the time :grin:

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And, of course, almost anything in the funk/soul/disco area is almost inevitably using some kind of envelope filter. I don’t even know what else is going on here to get this sick sound (octaver?, fuzz?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAxp8VDwBzc

Not necessarily what I like, but just to add to the examples… (and I’ll stop for now :smile:)

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I stripped the bass line out of a song I’m working on for a cover. Can anyone identify the effects used in this? I uploaded a short sample to Soundcloud in the hopes they don’t flag it as a copyright violation (as they always do).

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Sounds like an LFO chained to a volume knob increasing and decreasing the amplitude? Or maybe a very slow phaser?

It could also be neither and just has one of those synth/upright emulators that sometimes swell the amplitude in like that. Or I’m just wrong about all of it and it has no effect other than light compression with automation on the fader in some parts.

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Thanks,

It’s from a 1972 southern rock song, if that helps…

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Did you just slice that part out in the song which had soloed bass or did you extract it with software? There could also be a chorus in there too, idk. But I know those guys love compressors, envelope filters, octavers, tremolos, choruses/flangers/phasers.

Because software can leave behind unwanted digital artifacts when trying to extract a certain part by isolating the rest of the frequency content that can be happening at the same time. Although I know tech is constantly getting better.

Or maybe you just soloed the bass part from your own cover and uploaded it as a single track?

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Octaver + chorus maybe? Or phaser, maybe flanger.

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I isolated the bass with Isotope RX8 audio extractor directly from the original song track. This is not me playing, it’s the original bass player.

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@howard I think you nailed it. I tried it with the POG and Bass Clone, and it sounds close. I don’t own a flanger, so can’t try that. I’m going to play around with the settings and see what I can do. Thanks!

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You can’t identify which effects are used this way from extracted track. RX8 is using sophisticated machine learning algorithms to this job but it’s not perfect so you will always hear other elements of the low end as well. That wobbling you are hearing is just a side effect of imperfect separation and not effect itself.

What’s the song name?

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Melissa by the Allman Brothers

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https://youtu.be/Pwbowi-8Yoo

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That’s just P-bass played with the pick, I don’t hear any effects…with flats probably.

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Thanks

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Ahh yeah in the mix it sounds totally different. The extracted track definitely has some phase distortion with something else going on, and sounds doubled or octaved.

agree - in the mix that’s what it sounded like to me too.

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+1 to this - no matter how good your ear is, you’re not hearing the actual bass isolated so whatever you identify will be skewed. Your ear will be decoding “how could you recreate the sound of this weird mix of bass, drums, and guitar frequencies,” which yields a very different results!

P-bass with a pick, all the way. Tone knob up. It does thump like flatwounds, to my ear, but maybe more modern flats, not like a super dark 10-yr-old La Bellas kind of sound. Cool tone! And fun topic!

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