Are you a pseudo bass player like me? Then today’s video tip will help a lot. Great bass guitar recordings have little to do with complexity and riffs and way more to do with intentionality. Take a listen to two ways I’ve played the bass lines to this song and discover the two secrets to getting a tighter and punchier bass guitar sound in your recordings.
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My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Awesome tricks! Your bass sound great, was the squier jaguar was DI or with 11Rack?
Jaguar straight into the 11Rack
I learned about this a couple of years ago and suddenly my band started sounding really awesome. Bass players (in my experience) tend to not always know what to play when the song calls for a simple groove and this trick works pretty much every time!
Also Graham – Your drums sounds KILLER! I know you’ve recorded them in a studio which isn’t that big of a room but man, you can’t tell on the recording, they sound FAT! 🙂
oh and one more thing. Just like you did in the video – it’s important to figure out when to play the notes. But also when to release them. If you play on a kick hit, it often sounds good to mute that note on the following snare hit. 🙂
This is a very nice tip for non-bassists!
However, as a bassist, I think everybody should be aware in first place of how the song is. That little trick both will and will not always work. To take this video a little step further, a really nice trick to write a cool bassline (if you’re not a bassist) is to play around 3rd, 5th and octave notes.
Like Graham says here, no need to complicate things. But in a whole record, making the bass playing always the related note is a little boring. Even playing ONE different note from the tonic every four bars will keep your bass more interesting.
Keep it up Graham! Love your blog!
Great tip Graham. Soon as I saw this I quickly thought of Ozzy’s “Waiting For Darkness”. Listen to the beginning of the song and hear what Bob Daisley does with the bass line. Perfectly sums up your point of following that kick.
Keep up the great work!!
Wow! I never realized how much better a track could sound by coordinating the bass sound with the percussion like that. I’ve always organized bass lines separately from drums, so I guess I need to coordinate with my drummer more from now on in writing and recording.
Good video, am I correct in interpreting this as more of phrasing with an interplay between bass and drums, and not just kind of noodling out a long riff?
Drummer in my band hits drum kick very unpredictable, so I have difficulty to catch his tone with my bass. It ends when I show him pro tools screen of our playing before editing. 🙂
Couldn’t agree more. Listen to Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood. Not only does the bass follow the kick drum but some of the bass licks follow the drum fills. The effect is brilliant.
Very very good advice here, and like a commenter said above try to play inversions every now and then or simply play tonic through some chord changes for variation and emotional impact. Listen to Roger Waters or John McVie. These dudes play the most simple bass lines and they move the song up to a whole new level both rhythmically and emotionally.
Hi Graham – I have an important question for ya-
I am kind of new to recording, but I have already made some great stuff.
My problem is with Bass tracks. When I record my bass and then playback the
track, the Bass is so BIG it almost shakes the desk! I tried to put a compressor on it to tame it a bit, but still same result. Could that be an EQ issue? I know there is Low Bass, Bass, and upper Bass. Is there something you I can do to tame that down some? You help is greatly appreciated. Thank U
Could be your room or your speakers. How is the placement of your speakers in the room? Check out this post: http://therecordingrevolution.com/2014/03/05/how-to-create-your-own-mixing-sweet-spot
Hi Graham –
Thanks for your reply – actually I was tracking the Bass using headphones.
The Bass just sounded too arena huge in my car speakers and my home stereo.
I might try using a High Pass filter around the 80Hz region maybe?
My guitar , vocal, and everything else sounds great.
Just the Bass guitar has way too much energy in the lower regions.
Sounds kind of hollow as well. Bass is being recorded direct.
I have NS10′s also, but I wasn’t using those to track the Bass parts.
Thank you
hi Graham,
i would like to point out the difference between playing simpler basslines and playing functional or working bass lines. Telling the bass player to play a simpler bassline is a bit limiting in my opinion and misses a part of the point (or the opportunities). The idea is good, its just not optimally formulated. I’d rather like to call it learning to play a ‘more functional bassline’; the result COULD be a simpler bassline but doesn’t have to be. The chorus in this video wasn’t simpler and there were as many notes as before, only the pattern and the duration of the notes changed. I see the bass as a medium between guitars and drums (i -as a bassplayer) am often inspired by the rythm of the bassdrum and the notes of the guitars to combine them for my own riff).
glad to have found your website, i will read everything!
greetz and respect
Tom Trancez
Great comments and for much music is quite valid.
However, perhaps there are times when it musically needs to be the other way around – the bass line has a melodic and harmonic function, shape, and rhythm in the context of the song, and in those situations the kick drum and whole drum part in general could follow the BASS.
Musically the most important lines are the top, the melody, and the bottom, the bass. This has been true since at least the Baroque era.
I know that the trend since the 1980’s has been to mix the snare and kick louder and louder, as if they were lead instruments, and maybe now they are , but as a bassist I think there needs to be a bit more give and take between the drummer’s kick patterns and the bassist’s specific lines at any one time, rather than it strictly being the bass player’s job to follow the bass drum pattern.
In the 60’s and 70’s a lot of us thought that the bass and the kick needed to lock in to a great degree, but not exactly the same parts, and this was why so much music of that time sounds a bit different from the current styles – it’s not just the gear, it’s the musical approach.
I’m going out on a limb and state that I personally think the kick drum has grown FAR more important than it musically should be. As I mentioned, drums have been mixed hotter over the years, and there’s a point at which “thump” and ” slap” from the kick become so large a part of the sound that I feel it has adversely affected the musical roles of other instruments.
Just a thought. I doubt it will change the way things are!
Is it just me or does Graham looks like Justin Timberlake when he talks, and even more so when singing…. :d :d. I’m a big fan and have bought all courses and watched more than 50% of all YouTube videos and blogs and series….. and if you decide to ever pursue a career in acting I think it would be super cool and I would definitely watch the movie just because of Graham being in it :d :d :d