Bass home recording on a budget: Scarlet 2i2, Guitarix and Ardour.

[IMENATOR]

I decided to share some of my short experience so far, hopefully other people in the forum have gone thru the same path already and can provide tips, for people wanting to get started maybe it can provide some perspective.

First of all I am an amateur guitar player and I have put my budget on upgrading my rig for a better tone going from digital modelling to tube based preamp in a box with camb sim outupt. I had already made some progress in home recording for guitar and virtual drums using Linux.

- Old 2010 laptop with Core i3 and 4 GB RAM. It originally had Win7 but I have installed Ubuntu Studio 16.04 instead.
- Logitec speaker system 2323 for desktop. It is not pro monitors but it has a nice subwoofer box that really makes me get a good feel of the low end coming out. I already at this from a couple of years ago.
- Focusrite Scarlet 2i2. I originally chose this for guitar recording using line input but it supports instrument input both for guitar and bass.
- Software used:
* Ubuntu Studio 16.04 as the main operating system, it comes preloaded with tons of software for music production among many others for video, photography and publishing. It is gratis and installation is really easy.
* QJackCtl to configure and start the underlying sound engine "JACK". The key here is to properly select the Scarlet 2i2 device as the input device for jack and set the parameters for proper latency value.
* Guitarix as amp simulator, configured with "Ampeg" tone stack, 4x10 cab and Calf compressor plugin.
* Ardour as DAW, this is way more flexible and as opposed to Audacity which I already had used before. Ardour needs a learning curve but once if you have ever used a DAW then you can get started very quickly. I ended up using Ardour instead of Audacity because I noticed Audacity was having a weird delay in my recording so that when I was plaing against a click track my bass line was out of sync with the click track, Ardour worked just fine and that is why I started to use it.
- Bass being used: Ibanez GSR200, this is from their affordable GIO series, its my friends bass but I plan on buying one of my own soon.

At this point I think it is fair to say the best decision I took was to go for the Scarlet 2i2, the guys at Focusrite did a proper USB implementation according to standards that lead it to be a true plug and play device for linux and there are lots of people out there confirming it has been working fine on Linux so far. To me this was very important so it could be properly integrated into free software and keep my budget to minimum.

Next step: I will try to take some screenshots of my Jack configuration with Scarlet 2i2 which is needed before doing anything else with the software. Once that is done I will try to make a demo track with Hydrogen dum machine and some bass and guitar.


If you have done similar configuration and recording before please let me know how it was for you.

 

[Funkfingers]

Re: Bass home recording on a budget: Scarlet 2i2, Guitarix and Ardour.

I would be wary of using self-powered 2:1 computer loudspeakers for monitoring. The sub-woofer bass driver is likely to artificially boost the low end. This is fine for enhancing your home gaming experience but is likely to skew your EQ and level settings for recording bass guitar. Flat frequency response is the ideal.

The Ibanez GSR range of bass guitars is excellent value for money but, in my opinion, it would be worth holding out for the SR series. Make certain that you are content with the sounds from the stock pickups. They tend to be of non-standard dimensions, making it difficult to find drop-in replacements from other pickup manufacturers.

 

[IMENATOR]

Re: Bass home recording on a budget: Scarlet 2i2, Guitarix and Ardour.

I would be wary of using self-powered 2:1 computer loudspeakers for monitoring. The sub-woofer bass driver is likely to artificially boost the low end. This is fine for enhancing your home gaming experience but is likely to skew your EQ and level settings for recording bass guitar. Flat frequency response is the ideal.

The Ibanez GSR range of bass guitars is excellent value for money but, in my opinion, it would be worth holding out for the SR series. Make certain that you are content with the sounds from the stock pickups. They tend to be of non-standard dimensions, making it difficult to find drop-in replacements from other pickup manufacturers.

Thanks for the comments. The subwoofer has and adjustable independent level so I just don't set it too high, just to a point I like what I hear, I also listen to the recording again using some good earphones. I still don't get to the point of mixing my demos, so far it is just a raw recording that can be mixed/eq later. About this bass, I am not sure if I may buy it to my friend or not but it is really punchy, I have to lower the 2i2 input a lot as opossed to my guitar preamp cab sim, this bass guitar has an active bass boost.