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Last Night for The Home Recording Show I did a quick, pointless shootout of some bass distortion pedals.
Enjoy!
Hopefully the Vimeo embed works, if not it’s on YouTube too.
Bass Distortion Shootout from Jon Tidey on Vimeo.
There’s not really any point to this, there’s no moral to the story and no quiz. However, I will say I think any one of these sounds is better than what I can get with plugins.
The hard part about recording a distorted bass is that often you have no reference of what it will sound like with the rest of the instruments. Committing to a distorted bass sound early can bite you in the ass when it comes time to mix. For that reason alone, it’s a good idea to record a clean DI along with it.
If you save the distortion for when you are mixing, you can reamp through a distortion pedal.
I was just listening to some tracks over at the Propellerhead Music Forum.
Some tracks lacked a cohesive “vibe” to them. This often happens when using REX loops.
A loop is a recording of a performance. Depending on how a player plays, what the sequencer was set to, bad editing, or anything in between, the vibe can be very different from what you might get when quantizing. Let’s not go into the quantizing debates. 
If you have a loop with it’s feel kicking away in your track and then you sequence along with it, you may notice that the feel/vibe isn’t there. Quantizing may not fix it as the vibe in the loop may not be quantized. Playing it over and over until you get it right may not be helping. What to do? Groove Quantize!
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Last night I spent a few hours listening to some of my favorite songs. So what, right? What was different was listening to it in Mid/Side, and muting the center. It’s really quite amazing what kind of sounds are buried in your favorite albums.
To do this you’ll need an M/S Decoder. I use the free Soundhack +Matrix from the freesound bundle.
On a stereo audio audio track, insert your M/S decoder, set it to L/R>M/S (which will convert Left and Right information to Mid and Side.
Then insert a Multi-Mono Trim plugin. Unlink the channels and mute the Left side.
Then insert another M/S decoder and convert the Mid + Side back into Left + Right.
Drop in a song and have fun!
Original: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Mid Only: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Side Only: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadTry it with anything from Tool Ænima, the side is all room mics, extremely cool.
Announcing DRIVEDRUMS, a new drum sample library from MoReVoX. All the guys here at AGZ are itching to try out this collection and we’ll have a full review of DRIVEDRUMS in the near future.
Distortion is at the center of an exciting sound.
MoReVoX DRIVEDRUMS has been developed by generating distortion through different kinds of devices.
Vacuum Tubes, Analog Tapes, Preamps are been used to create samples with light to aggressive and violent distortion.
MoReVoX DRIVEDRUMS contains RICH and FAT natural acoustic sounds ideal for every kind of music. All samples are been tested on mixes and optimized for retriggering and stand alone use.
The MoReVoX DRIVEDRUMS Samples have been divided into two categories : Drive Samples and Over Samples.
The Drive Samples have been developed starting from the classic hardware harmonic distortion , so all the samples contain a smoother distortion character (Tape compression warmth, subtle valve saturation).
The Over Samples instead are based on distortion; the samples have been developed finding their character in conjunction with the hardware distortion (Valve/Console Preamps, Analog Tape Saturation, Heavy Valve Compression, Dedicated distortion outboard).
MoReVoX DRIVEDRUMS contains 30 Kicks, 30 Snares, 8 Toms Racks, 30 Cymbals and more for a total of 800 Samples 24Bit|44.1kHz.
Developed by : Sabino Cannone
Available on DVD & Digital Download
Prices : $ 99 [Download] $ 129 [DVD]
Review coming soon!
