Hi. My name is Carlos, I am from Brazil. I am a guitar player, singer and songwriter. Since 2011, I am playing with the band Djalma não entende de política, from the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. We make a kind of post-wagnerian progressive hard sambas with a pinch of pop music and the influence of Andrezão and Raul Seixas.
I am going to use this blog for the assignments I will have to produce weekly during the course “Introduction to Music Production”, developed by Berklee College of Music / Coursera.
Every week I will try to combine the theory we are learning through the video lessons with the experience I have been building up with Djalma.
I think that preparing our own lessons can be a very productive way to interchange experiences and go deeper in our topics of interest.
Hope you enjoy it!
For this first exercise, I am going to discuss how to record an electric bass guitar without an amplifier. I chose this subject because my band has been having a lot of problems when recording the bass. In fact, we have never got a satisfactory sound for it. There is always a kind of interference or noise.
After this first week of the course, I am able to understand what is wrong in our attemps. I am going to analyze our wrong procedures, because a concrete experience may have a very pedagogical function. I just ask you a little bit of patience with my lack of knowledge about music production.
So… What have we been doing wrong?
1- Awful cables. We use low quality cables, we do not expend money with this kind of equipment…It brings consequences.
2- Too long cables connecting the bass guitar into the audio interface.
3- No direct box: we were connecting the bass directly into the audio interface, because we do not like so much how our bass amplifier sounds. In addition, we do not have a good microphone for recording a bass amp.
In summary: everything’s wrong.
So… What may we do from now?
1- For discussing how to make a good audio record, it is necessary to talk a little about cables. Yes, cables! They are an essential item for any recording. So, my band and I will have to think about spending some money on it.
2- It is also important to understand that T/S mono cables used for basses are a kind of unbalanced cables. In other words, they are more susceptible to noise. A simple way to reduce the noise problem is reducing the cable length. The longer your T/S cable is, the noisier is your audio signal.
3- Although cables were essential, I think that the most important device to mention here is the Direct Box. It has the function of converting an unbalanced signal to a balanced one. So, after turning your bass guitar on, you got to plug its T/S cable into a Direct Box. Then, a XLR cable will connect it into the audio interface. The XLR cable is balanced and can reject those noises that disturb your recordings. With this cleaner audio signal, it is possible to get a much more pleasant sound for the bass.
I think that with those new clues about bass recording, my band will be able to have better records. And preparing this assignment helped me to review the most importante steps for recording an electric bass guitar.
Thank you very much. I do not have a perfect English, but I am trying to write something understandable for my classmates.
