I was playing bass for our group so before the session I made sure that I had learned and practice the piece. We recorded the bass through a DI box and an amplifier in the dead room for a clean sound. The DI signal went straight into the desk while we tried two different microphones on the amp. We positioned an AKG D112 and an AKG 414 towards the amp at an equal distance from each other. We placed them at around 3/9 o’ clock so as not to get a too bass or treble heavy sound and also had them very close to the speaker for a dry sound. We tested the two microphones by soloing them on the desk and decided that the 414 had the clearer sound that fitted the song more so we went with that.
One problem on the amplifier was that it had a bad hiss when the treble nob was up caused by a faulty tweeter. So we got around this simply by putting it to zero which was fine as we wanted a low/mid sound. I set the EQ on the amp at around 1 o’ clock on the low and 12 o’ clock on the mid nob. I did not want any part of the sound to be overpowering as the bass in our chosen track Beat It is mimicking the guitar part throughout.
Before the recording I used a guitar tuner to ensure I was in tune and played through the piece by myself a few times. As well as playing along to the drums from last week Panashe also provided guide vocals during the recording (using an sEX1 microphone). Even though I was performing in the mixing room I wore headphones so that I could hear the track better. At the end of the best take I made a mistake so to remedy this we set a pre-role before the mistake so that I could play along and correct it without having to punch in or crossfade.