At the start of this year I started to learn how to play bass. As a guitar player, one of my strategies for learning bass is to learn songs. The first song I learned was “Street of Dreams” by Rainbow. The second song was “Another Day in Paradise” by Phil Collins.
My home studio is a very simple setup and it is electric guitar centric. I use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 that I connect to my laptop via USB. I then have three guitar amp plugins by Neural DSP: Archetype: Nolly, Archetype: Plini, and Soldano SLO-100. As an example, you can hear my Electric guitar using the Soldano plugin on my band’s song “Waiting for Reasons”.
But now that I needed to record bass guitar, I wanted to see if I could repurpose one of my Neural DSP guitar plugins for the job. And the result was excellent!
Archetype: Nolly
If you have the Archetype: Nolly plugin, you can download my preset tone here.
The Archetype: Nolly plugin comes from Adam “Nolly” Getgood, a multi-instrumentalist and producer. Knowing that Nolly is a bass player, I decided to use this plugin in order to dial in my bass tone.
I also referenced Billy Sheehan’s amp settings tips from his basic bass lesson video.
I picked the Crunch amp and set it to the following:
- Gain: 3
- Bass: 7
- Mid: 8.5
- Treble: 5
- Presence: 5
- Depth: 5
- Master: 5
- Level: 6
I activated the Compressor as well:
- Compression: 5
- Level: 4.5
I turned off both microphones in the cabinet. Since this is a guitar plugin, it didn’t sound that great to use a guitar cabinet with the bass.
I set the EQ to the following:
And finally I added a little bit of Reverb (since I was playing an 80s song):
That’s it! My bass was plugged directly into the Scarlett 2i2, and I used Reaper for my recording software.