Elvis Costello - "Accidents Will Happen" - Five Basses

[sloop_john_b]

Here's my last video of the weekend, I promise! LOL.

Took all five of my "gamers" and used 'em on this one killer bass line by Bruce Thomas.

Which one do ya like? Hate?

Enjoy and thanks for watching:

[jps]

The Höfner section seems to have been played with less force than the other basses, can you confirm this?

For the moment, I like the Höfner tone best for this song. I would have liked for the bed tracks to be a bit louder as your basses way overpower them making it hard to really hear how well the different basses would sit in the track.

[sloop_john_b]

The Höfner section seems to have been played with less force than the other basses, can you confirm this?

For the moment, I like the Höfner tone best for this song. I would have liked for the bed tracks to be a bit louder as your basses way overpower them making it hard to really hear how well the different basses would sit in the track.

I think I played the Hofner with the same force; if it was less, then the difference is only negligible at best. Kind of a tough bass to really dig in with the way I would with a P though!

Getting a good balance is tough because the idea here was to be able to show the difference in tones between each bass. This is inherently more difficult with basses then guitars. To emphasize this best, I had to keep the bed track fairly low.

I also couldn't play the Jazz how I usually do (over the neck pickup) because I was getting all kinds of nasty clicks from hitting the polepieces with the string. This is something that doesn't come through live, but the DI did not like it! Shame because it would have sounded far better had I played it that way.

[jps]

Interesting about the Höfner. It definitely has a softer, thicker tone than any of the other basses, making the other basses with flats sound like they have roundwounds on them by comparison.

[antipodean]

Great vid JB!

I agree with Jeff re tone - the Fenders and Stingray sound very bright. The inherent brightness of the DI/recording set up may be swamping the inherent tones of each instrument. Were you playing straight through a DI or did you use a pre-amp/amp?

My favourite is the 4003 (when it isn't clipping), followed by the Hofner.

[sloop_john_b]

Great vid JB!

I agree with Jeff re tone - the Fenders and Stingray sound very bright. The inherent brightness of the DI/recording set up may be swamping the inherent tones of each instrument. Were you playing straight through a DI or did you use a pre-amp/amp?

My favourite is the 4003 (when it isn't clipping), followed by the Hofner.

Thanks! I was going into the Line6 POD's built-in DI (no amp modeler or anything like that), then into a PreSonus Firepod interface, into Logic 8. No EQ, no compression, nada.

I tried at first to use my favorite amp modeler on the POD, but it was coloring everything far too much. All the basses were practically sounding the same. The DI seemed to me to be the best way to go.

[jdogric12]

I would have liked for the bed tracks to be a bit louder

b**** b**** b****...

[fireglo67]

1. Hofner
2. Fender Fullerton
3. Ric 4003
4. Fender Road Worn
5. Music Man

[woodyng]

Over the cheep speaker i heard these on, the p bass fared best, the hofner worst.

[ricken5er]

Hofner sounded pretty cool

[walker]

Cool exercise! I didn't HATE any of the basses, but the Fender Jazz was my least favorite. It's tone is SO generic to my ear. The Stingray gave the song a nice contemporary punch, but when the P came up, I was "Winner! Contest over." It's hard to see past that bias since Costello's guy played a P, and it just works so well with this type of music. But then hearing the Rick right after that, I was like "Wait a minute! Contest back on!" When you used just the bridge pickup, it really had a closely rivaling growl to the P. If you were able to back off the gain so it didn't clip, I can imagine it working just as well for the recording. I really liked the Hofner on that end part. If this was a recording session, it would be cool to go ahead and use one bass for the main part of the song and switch to the Hofner for the outro.