"My theory is the reason that so many bass players are producers is we all get tired of how bad our bass ends up sounding on records and we decide to do something about it," says Melvin Gibbs, echoing sentiments I've heard from dozens of bassists, from low to high profile. "It's a disaster. I used to get depressed when I first started. I'd go into one session, before I owned any equipment, and the bass sounds amazing. Next day, the same bass sounds horrible. And you're kinda like, 'What?!'"
"There's a standard frequency range that people expect the bass to take up, when they see an electric bass. If you try to explain, 'Well, actually I'm hearing it more like a Moog,' and you want a different frequency curve, you can try to explain that to them. They won't get it. I've never seen the kind of things that happen with guitar. A guy comes in with a big heavy metal guitar, it sounds like a heavy metal guitar. But a guy comes in with a reggae bass sound — imagine turning that into Jason Newsted or some shit? People feel the need to conform the sound to what they think it's supposed to be, as opposed to what they're actually hearing."
"But I think there are other options to how the bass should sound. I like to hear a really thick sound — I don't necessarily like to always have the bass sit exactly in thefrequency range that is the traditional frequency range. If you listen to the records that everybody thinks sound good, the way they use bass is different than the way the bass is getting used now. They used a lot more of the low end of the bass, a lot less of the mid — I like to hear that quality in the bass. But I also like the bass to cut, so it's almost like some heavy metal guitar sound kind of thing. I don't like to hear as much mid in the thing, because I want to hear more volume — you know what I mean?"
In response, he prescribes attentive listening and flexible thinking to engineers, "A lot of the time I used to do sessions, the bass is not being cut live anyway. So why does it have to be the 1176 [compressor]? Why can't you try something different that's going to give you a different, and/or better sound? I remember this one record I did with Arto [Lindsay] that probably has one of the best bass sounds I have. We went in there and he set up in the studio — he plugged me into the 1176, and I said, 'Well, why are we using that?' He said, 'Why not?' He had a Summit sitting there. I said, 'Why don't we try going through that, see what that sounds like?' And the bass sounded amazing."
Naturally, for bassists, awareness of sound and frequency are key, but perhaps less so for flexibility. Gibbs suggests determining exactly what kind of sound you want to produce on bass and establishing your own rules for reproducing that. "I learned you have to be like the Nashville guys. They have a rack of shit they roll in, they say 'See this thing? Plug it into your input. [laughs] All your bullshit, don't, no...' The closer you can get to that the better off you are."
Currently, Gibbs favors the simplicity of his Tobias basses and Avalon U5 DI, with which "it's hard for them to ruin the sound. No matter how hard they try to make it sound like what they think it's supposed to sound like, it still sounds like it's supposed to sound... I love the way the bass sounds just recorded direct to Pro Tools, because the bass sounds really tight, really punchy — it has a lot of power to it. I love the way the Avalon sounds, so I always make sure I bring my Avalon. I try to listen to all the compressors and I try to use the one that gives the fattest sound, if it's my session. If it's a kinda pop thing, a kinda radio thing or whatever, of course you're going to let them do the standard 1176, with the traditional settings that everyone has in their minds for what the bass is supposed to sound like."
One of Gibbs' favorite places to record bass is Bill Laswell's studio, where among other projects, he tracked DJ Logic's first CD, Project Logic. He remembers: "That was my Avalon DI into Laswell's RCA compressor, to tape, period. Oh and I had the Waldorf filter at the time, and the bass sounds killing. No other extra bullshit."
Back in the Rollins band days, however, things were more complicated. On the second album, Come in and Burn, Gibbs tested the engineer's patience with an unusual and complicated setup: "I was using two amps and I had the sub, and I had it routed so that it was two signal chains — one that was always to the sub with two distortions, and one that was through the wah, and that would go to the high side. It was distorted too, but you'd have this kinda like frequency thing, this combing — but in headphones, it sounds like panning because of the way the frequencies work... The producer came in and was like, 'What?' I said, 'There's a method to my madness. I have this thing set up this way for a particular reason.' And he kind of didn't get it — at first, [he and the engineer] were really skeptical, until I got everything set up correctly, and then they got it, and the record sounds great, all the pieces of the bass sound."
Interestingly for a jazz/funk instrumentalist like Gibbs, he doesn't see Rollins' '90s line-up as experimentally conceptual, á la PIL's Album, which pitted punks, jazzbos, metal-shredders and world- beaters in an 'unusual suspects' scenario. "It'sfunny, 'cause, I always heard [Rollins'] band as a funk band. I always heard the funk aspect of what they did. And also, when I heard them, too, I was kinda like, 'Wow, listen to this bass player, he plays like me.' You know he played with the distortion and all the things that I was doing anyway. I actually liked the music a lot before there was any idea... I love working with Rollins."
Furthermore, he felt his biggest contribution to the band was to push things in a simpler rock direction. "My whole thing with them was, if they could just figure out how to take one of these 12 minute songs and make it into a 3 1/2 minute song, the thing would go to a whole other level. So that's one of the things that I kind of wanted... Not like 'Hey you guys have got to write shorter songs,' but just think about the way they use their forms. Because coming from doing the stuff that I do, with [Ronald Shannon Jackson]'s band, you used to have to do that all the time. With Shannon, you'd be on the road and the song would turn into a 15-minute song, and you'd come home and make the record and the song would have to be four minutes long. With him, we all had to learn to condense our ideas down, to sound bite size, so that was something that I felt that I brought."
Though he's engineered in large studios, his production style of late pretty much defines the terms "DIY" and "on-the-fly." Though he has a small recording set up in his Williamsburg loft apartment, it is by no means a studio. "Well, the guitar amps go in the bathroom. If I do any percussion stuff, I do it in the big room. Vocals get done in the kid's room."
The main space is a sharply live room, with a tile floor and giant glass windows. There's hardly any treatment for monitoring, which Gibbs feels isn't much of a liability. "As far as mixing in here, you have to take into account (and with tracking, especially) vocals — I have to be careful with that, obviously. I have to pay close attention because it's so live, to how much room gets up on the tracks. But when you're tracking stuff, an eccentric room is a very necessary thing, as a matter of fact... You go to all these places where they tracked all these records that really sound great. You go to Sun, you go to where they tracked the Motown records, you go to Rudy Van Gelder's — you get this perplexed look about... 'Oh, it's just a ROOM!'"
Gibbs uses Dunleavy speakers since the biggest year he had with Rollins, when, as he puts it, "I had like, [laughs] way too much money... I don't know. I bought them a while ago, so I don't know how the pricing is. But when I bought them, they were called 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and each number stood for how many thousands of dollars they cost. I got the number from the guy in the mastering studio, of this audiophile place in Jersey. And the only one's I really liked were the 1s and the 5s, and really just in terms of space, the 5s are this big [hands about three feet apart], so I really would have needed another room just for the system. So I just got the 1s. And that thing that the Oxygen is on, that's a sub. The power amp is some audiophile thing — the cables, some of them are Monster, some of them are ridiculously expensive cables. I decided to go that way because talking to a lot of the old engineers — the old records, everything was referenced to quality. The NS-10 thing kinda became a thing in the '70s. But I just liked the way the older records sounded, so I decided to go with the audiophile thing instead of the NS- 10/Crown thing. At some point I'll have to get some NS- 10s. The problem with these speakers is that they are reference speakers. A lot of music that you enjoy listening to [laughs] is not so enjoyable on those speakers."
"I have access to an Avalon compressor pre — it's at Arto's house right now — we kinda share it. On the other side of it, I have two Really Nice Compressors — I guess they're like 180 bucks now. They're amazing. You'd never believe they're that cheap — they sound really good. If I'm doing bass or guitar, I'll borrow a 421 from somebody, or I have a couple of Coles, but I don't tend to use them in the house because they're very room oriented, and because the room is so quirky, it might not work as well — and the Coles are so delicate you can't really put them close to the amps."
