...lets figure it out, I know you's are all mad for it and I'm pretty sure a bunch of us here have the capabilities here to have a decent stab at it. (just for fun ) anyway I was messing about today trying to replicate the periphery guitar tone from the walk producers give me your worst http://www.sendspace.com/file/njrvy4
I took a stab at this last year sometime. I spent about 10 minutes learning the song, so it's not quite on, I just needed an example song to learn to test this by: http://www.box.net/shared/cqpm9hniby
I'm in total agreement. That's sort of why the genre is pretty boring for me. It's more about sound and production it seems at times versus being melodic. And that's cool, I dig it some of the time, but it can be a little dry. Some of these djent bands should just hand their bassist another guitar. Would make more sense.
Don't be absurd, of course you can hear it. Half of the djent "guitar tone" IS the bass. You don't notice it so much because most of the time it's doubling the riffs. Believe me though, you'd soon know if it was gone.
I'm sure you would notice if it weren't there. But if you can't notice it when it IS there, then why not just give one of the guitars an octave pedal?
Was this at me or chrono? I definitely know you can hear it, I was more or less making the point that it's just a guitar mirror 100% of the time, not so much the presence in the mix. A few Meshuggah albums, the bass is huge and very noticeable.
Yeah, I hear now they're actually making guitars specifically designed to play notes a full octave below regular guitar. Why bother with a pedal when you can just get one of those?
What do you guys think of my sound clip? I'd like to get that tone perfect someday just for fun really. Any suggestions EQ/effects wise would help. I've never heard a bass track from a djent band by itself so my tone was shaped mostly from hearing the guitars. All I really had to go by.
By the way isn't it cool though how they manage to mix that pure heaviness in the sub octave range , which by experience is a nightmare to get everything sitting nice and tight without being muddy as fuck! Just like the Meshuggah record you guys mentioned, class mixdown!
Yeah Meshuggah mixes amaze me. So clean. A friend of mine who is a sound engineer A/B'd a BTBAM track from Colors and a song from ObZen. God damn it was so night/day. The BTBAM track sounded like the harsh vocals and the guitars were like fighting for the same sonic area. The Meshuggah track sounds like they took the audible frequency spectrum, divided it into a pie graph, and gave every instrument its piece with absolutely zero overlap. Don't get me wrong, the production on Colors is really good to me, but the Meshuggah mixes just seem cleaner.
production on Colors is fucking terrible and whoever mixed that album should be ashamed but I digress
Its true I agree totally! Sad thing is that a lot of these Djent bands get accredited for having "excellent production" even to the point where I have heard people say "sounds better than Meshuggah" to which I reply "no not at all especially since these guys wouldn't even exist without them or their class production, so shut the fuck up!". Anyways has anyone seen their live DVD that is insane how they sound so tight and again superb production!!
hey since this is like the official djent thread id thought id ask if this riff i wrote is considered djent or not. obviously not a drummer so feel free to laugh at the drums or the song altogether. i wrote measures 5-12 first if its not obvious. its really just a repeating riff that has 3 different rhythms and i changed the cymbal at 9 so it sounds like a new riff because the beat starts on an open string this time 9 june 11.gp5 - 0.01MB
meshuggah mixes are quirky, my biggest qualm with their approach production-wise is that everything in the 8 string range is doubled by the bass instead of playing an octave below, and that essentially makes the 7 string parts sound bigger and heavier than the 8 string parts. Listen to the solo section of Glints Collide, or the "drop" of the obzen riff later in the song for clear evidence of this. However i completely understand why they do this as it is pretty much their only option, the bass has as much if not more distortion than the guitars do, and as a result if they tried to follow down to an octave below the 8 string tunings it would just be a muddy mess with no audible fundamental note.
Hey bulb, I just watched watched your little video in Guitar World about djent or whatever, and you say "like" a hell of a lot. Kind of makes you sound a lot less intelligent than you probably are. Just sayin'.
I'M JUST GIVING HIM SOME CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM ABOUT HIS SPEECH SO THAT WHEN HE DOES ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE VIDEOS HE DOESN'T SOUND LIKE A 15 YEAR OLD GIRL TALKING TO ONE OF HER FRIENDS. Seriously though, just work on it. If you want to.
YES I've always thought this. I love Meshuggah to death but I hate how the bass plays in the same octave for the 8-string-heavy riffs, it's so backwards when they go up to Bb or whatever and the bass actually goes down in pitch and everything ends up sounding fuller. In my band, we actually have the bass dropped to F# an octave below my 8-string. We're still working on getting it as good as it can be (our bassist will be upping the gauge again and using a better bass), but it's actually fairly distinguishable on our EP for the most part. Needs a lot of work though.
Last time we brought a bass track a full octave below the 8-string rhythm guitars to the studio, our sound engineer soloed the bass track and laughed for 30 minutes straight.
It takes a lot of work and customising, but it is very doable. Also you have to play the string a certain way too, there's no point trying to play a fuckload of different notes on that string quickly, it's better to use it more as the root of a riff and use it sparingly.
Yeah, I can't imagine trying to play something like, say, the main rhythm from Bleed on a bass string tuned that low. You'd need to employ the approach of playing two 16th notes where the guitar is playing four 32nd notes (as a basic example), or it just plain wouldn't happen.
I like the tightness and definition of the unison sound... it doesn't really bug me that it isn't as full as some other parts.
i actually like when meshuggah drop the bass an octave. that solo section in glints collide is actually my favorite part because of it. then again, nothing is my favorite album. i wish there were more bands that would try to do slower tempo metal with polyrhythms and the like (obviously with minimal ripping off). Perpetual Black Second is my favorite meshuggah song, and it's not even close.
You guys do realize the fundamental of a bass an octave below an 8 string tuned to F or so is like 25 Hz right? You know the majority of speakers can't even play the fundamental then, right? You do also realize that the puchy bass "thud" that a buncha queers like is like 80-120 Hz, right? I feel like some of you are stupid actually
Not too too familiar with the Meshuggah discography...where are some places where the bass is a full octave below the 8-string guitars and a few sections where they're in complete unison so I can compare? Time stamps, preferably. Also, I notice a lot of bass players that when playing even on the B string sound really shitty and sloppy. You have to play really close to the bridge. Ok, yeah, common knowledge for many, but it's just competing with physics trying to get low frequencies that even. For an F# string that low, you'd really need to give the notes time to fully complete the elliptical shape before changing. More 8th note, longer tone stuff. Anything fast and technical is going to be lol, I don't care how good you are. I've worked on my technique a lot the past few months regarding playing fast stuff on the low B (with fairly normal tension, string gauge wise) and I sort of have to pluck near the bridge, but I angle my hand a bit to where I don't lose some of the lows that come with that territory. I've had great results.
You realize some of us are not faggots and have an awesome sound system with a proper subwoofer right?
Playing near the bridge can certainly help, but it alters the tone a lot as you pointed out. Part of the trouble is that in pre-packaged sets, most string manufacturers don't include a thick enough low B string in comparison to the rest of the set, and the tension on that string is a lot less than on the rest of the neck as a result. Come to think of it, they usually have the string tension completely ass-backwards in general, for that matter. The higher strings are normally too taut and the lower strings too loose, when ideally the balance should lean more the opposite way. These days I always buy a 40-60-80-100 4-string pack because that seems to be the best compromise in a pre-packaged set, and then get a 135 low B separately. I also use a 145 for drop A stuff, but I only really use that for Failure of Milk. Also, play a little softer on the low strings. You get more 'roundness' to the tone in comparison to the initial attack that way, which is usually more beneficial when playing that low.
Not to mention that recording engineers generally roll off the bottom end of a mix at about 25-30Hz to clean up the shit nobody can hear and stop people's speakers from having a heart attack, and even if they don't then the mastering engineer will. Lolz.
You should check out Circle K strings. Becoming super popular among the metal scene. I recently bought a pack and fucking hands down, the best strings I've ever used. They're one of the only companies who sell 'Balanced Tension' sets in such a variety of sets and gauges. They have very untraditional gauges. And they recently changed them again. When I got my set, I had stuff like 136.5 for the B, 102.5 for the E, and just really weird stuff. They're doing this to get as close to exact tension as possible. I put a pack of these on my 7 and the tension is literally equal, perfectly, from string to string and the volume as well. I'm not sure what scale your bass is, assuming 34" or 35", but here are the sets they have for 5-string balanced sets. Try the 136 set one day if you'd like. People on TalkBass go crazy about these and I know you post there a bit (I thought?...) http://circlekstrings.com/store/standard-balanced-5-strings.html
