4001 recording

[hieronymous]

Cool jam - sweet resolve with the 7-4-1. Great sounding '76. What strings did you put on?

Funny - I just got into changing strings one at a time for my 60's basses which have necks that are more pliable than my 70's 4001s.

I used DR Hi Beams. For the longest time I was using Lo Riders, but Paul W. noted that I was having some tail lift and suggested lower tension strings. The Hi Beams are supposed to be lower tension than the Lo Riders, so I thought I would give them a try. So far, so good! I was afraid I might have to make a truss rod adjustment but it seems ok, though that would imply that there wasn't much of a tension change...

[walker]

Cool. I use the Hi Beams and the Sun Beams - love DRs. Used them for years. They seem to sound great and last forever. I may look into something with a higher tension, though. How are Rotosounds in that regard? Steven Sullivan had a set of nickel coated steels that sounded amazing. Just waiting to hear back from him on the longevity factor.

[hieronymous]

I posted this in the bass section but figured I'd add it in here for posterity:

Filter Valley

100% improvised, recorded at a recent rehearsal, the Autumnglo 4001 through a 3Leaf GR2 envelope filter & Fulltone Bass Drive distortion, played with an Adamas graphite pick.

[walker]

Nice, H! "Who's got the funk???" That's a wicked envelope filter, alright!

Interesting mix with the instrumentation fading in & out - very '70s! Also interesting how you pulled the bottom end of the bass in & out, too.

(sidenote on the Rotosounds - they didn't sound nice for very long!)

[hieronymous]

Interesting mix with the instrumentation fading in & out - very '70s! Also interesting how you pulled the bottom end of the bass in & out, too.

That's my Alembic SF-2 Superfilter. It's actually all over the first half - the first part before the whole band comes in, the bass was lacking a little bottom end because it was recorded before the amp eq, so I added in a little sub-bass to the original track. Also, I couldn't get the two tracks (solo bass & full band) exactly synced, so when played together the bass frequencies were getting cancelled out. So I used the SF-2 in high-pass mode to try and take out some of the bottom in the solo track. But I liked the sound so used it in the mix!

(sidenote on the Rotosounds - they didn't sound nice for very long!)

That's a bummer! Strings can be so finicky. I'm enjoying the DR HiBeams on the Ric, though I've only really used them twice. I'm wondering if the studio being cold helped keep me from sweating, so they may still have some life in them. But when I go into an un-airconditioned studio in the summer (San Francisco Bay Area mind you), my strings come out practically rusted!

[walker]

Yeah, "I feel your pain," definitely. When my hands get sweaty all over the '68 neck that old finish basically melts in my hands and gets them all sticky and coats the strings, too - deadens them right quick. But I boil the strings when they get gunked up and that seems to bring them back to life quite a bit. I ran out of DRs recently and used a set of GHS Boomers - for being sort of a medium-quality string, they sound pretty dang good - lasted a heck of a lot longer than the Rotos, too.

[hieronymous]

New old track up on soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/hieronymous-seven ... e-take-one

This is from the very first hieronymous recording session - August 2002! I had been playing with these guys (Gary Backstrom on guitar, Greg DeGuglielmo on drums) for months by this point so we were pretty tuned in to each other, plus played with Gary for several years earlier in the previous decade as Jiggle the Handle - Greg was a member for a while - and of course Greg and I have been playing together since then. But this recording pointed the way to limitless possibilities...