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WHERE’S THE FUCKING BASS???
I’m liking the album so far, but there’s NO bass in the mix. And it’s not having to do with my system — I’ve got speakers with 15" woofers and listen to house-shaking dub all the time, so if there’s even the teeniest amount of bass in the mix my system will blow it all out of proportion. But there’s even less bass on Beyond than there is on your typical Bob Mould album.
It’s the weirdest thing — for the first time in a decade J has a bass player on an album…….and mixes him down so low he might as well not be there. The bass is a little more prominent on Lou’s cuts, but only a little. For a band whose live sound involves chest-shaking bass, it sure is weird not to have any of that presence on the album. In this way, at least, Beyond sounds like the logical follow-up to Green Mind, which is the only other album I’ve heard with this little bass in the mix (though I think GM has more bass than Beyond).
Wonder if Lou is steamed about that?
So far, that’s the only real disappointment with the new one, though it’s really starting to bug me (no pun intended).
WHERE’S THE FUCKING WAH, too!!!
For a band whose live sound involves face-melting wah, it sure is weird not to have any of that presence on the album. Did J’s favorite pedal get stolen or something? I was pretty sure he was still using it live…he was back in August when I saw them.
there was plenty of wah wah on the Free so Free album. more than ever. no problem skipping the wah for a while. there are some cool guitar sounds on beyond, no need for wah all the time.
where’s the bass? its probably in a swap meet in pakistan about now…. did you see lou’s new bass in the video? i think we need to start a rickenbacker fund for lou…. the mix is great.. you just need to adjust your lows more… my dub is picking up some good bass right now on crumble.
"crazycloud " wrote:where’s the bass? its probably in a swap meet in pakistan about now…. did you see lou’s new bass in the video? i think we need to start a rickenbacker fund for lou…. the mix is great.. you just need to adjust your lows more… my dub is picking up some good bass right now on crumble.My lows can’t get any lower. My preferred frequency is below 30 hertz. Granted, I like bass to tear down the walls and destroy the floor, and I don’t expect that from guitar-rock bands. But there’s really no low-end in this mix. The guitar sounds great. The vocals sound fine. The drums are a little low in the mix for my taste, though, and the bass is practically non-existent. There’s loads of bass in the YLAOM and Bug remasters, and enough bass to feel on Where You Been and the other Dino records aside from Green Mind. It’s just weird that there’s so little in the Beyond mix, especially since what’s been remarkable for me about the Dino reunion shows is how up-front Lou’s bass sound has been, especially during the last couple mini-tours. I was really hoping that the muted bass presence on the Fog records would be rectified with the J/Lou/Murph lineup on this one. Instead, I’m straining to hear Lou, despite the fact that he tends to play loud chords. Weird.
I should confess that Jah Wobble, Bill Laswell, and heavy dub records set my standard for bass, which is like saying that the blue whale sets my standard for the size of all mammals. But still, even compared with other Dino records, this is a pretty bass-less mix. A solid record, and a great one for guitar playing, but a bass-less one nonetheless.
Maybe J has gotten so accustomed to laying down all the tracks himself that he has a hard time dealing with other people playing on his records?
"crazycloud " wrote:where’s the bass? its probably in a swap meet in pakistan about now…. did you see lou’s new bass in the video? i think we need to start a rickenbacker fund for lou….I’m not sure that bass is his — could be Thurston Moore’s since that’s where they filmed the video. The blue Fender is pretty much what he plays nowadays. And, at least some of the record was done before their gear was stolen.
Good question. I’ve been noticing that the bass isn’t as prominent as I had hoped, too, though I’m not having trouble hearing it most of the time–just that it’s quite a bit less massive than on the other albums by the original Dino lineup. It varies from song to song: it is very easy to hear on Lightning Bulb, louder than the guitar in fact. It’s fairly easy to hear on This is All I Came to Do and Yer My Son, but fairly difficult to hear on Almost Ready. I’m listening to it on some shitty computer speakers (OK, they are relatively big for computer speakers, but all computer speakers suck), and I can almost always hear the bass, albeit not very well compared to, say, Bug. The most important thing is that I can FEEL the bass, and the album brings back the monstrous J/Murph/Lou mash-up sound for the first time since Bug.
What I can’t agree with is your statement that there is no low-end in the mix. Actually, there is plenty of low-end in the mix–it’s nothing like Green Mind, which is a good example of a mix without much low end. It’s not that the album doesn’t have a lot of bass frequencies–it’s just that actual bass guitar isn’t that audible, which is a different thing. One of the reasons why the bass is so easy to hear on an album like Bug is actually that Lou is often playing pretty high, thus making the bass more audible (No Bones is a good example of this), and he also used to use a more trebly tone, even when he was playing low. On Beyond, Lou simply isn’t doing a lot of high-end bass stuff on this album–he’s doing a lot more conventional, low-end stuff, and that makes him harder to hear. To use Bug again as an example, compare the audibility of the bass on Freak Scene compared to that of No Bones–the bass is FAR more audible on the latter, because Lou is often playing higher and using a lot more chords. On Freak Scene, the bass is pretty much at the same level as it is for most of Beyond, despite a more trebly guitar sound.
Which brings me to another factor: another thing that makes the bass more or less audible is the guitar parts (and of course, how they are mixed and panned). On Beyond, there are a lot of low-end, distorted rhythm guitar parts that are operating in similar frequencies to the bass, and that naturally makes the bass less audible. In some of Dinosaur’s past stuff, even when J has done a lot of guitar overdubs, it’s been much more high-end, trebly stuff, but a lot of the guitar stuff on Beyond is much lower in frequency. My real problem with the mix that they didn’t manage to isolate the bass enough, so sometimes the rhythm guitar parts and the bass end up being all balled together. There are a few places where I’m not actually sure whether what I’m hearing is a bass or rhythm guitar–not surprising considering the fact that Lou’s bass sometimes sounds quite rhythm-guitarish, and then there are low-end, distorted rhythm guitar chords operating in the same frequencies. On the bonus tracks, the bass is really quite prominent, but I think it’s largely because those songs have fewer guitar overdubs obscuring the bass. And, of course, the bass is always going to be relatively easy to hear live because you only have one guitar part going on at once.
All in all. I think that this is a great album, their best since the 80’s, but I think the biggest fault is the mix. My problem isn’t really the volume of the bass, though, and it certainly isn’t a lack of low end, it’s more that not enough care was taken to keep all of the low-end frequencies separate, so you kind of get a mash-up on the lower ends.
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