Looking for a Fleetwood Mac bass sound

[Peter_IK]

(After all, the crazily distorted guitar tone on the Beatles' "Revolution" was achieved by running DI guitar into two violently overloaded console preamps in series. )

I would love to have seen the looks on the faces of the EMI engineers when they did this.

It's amazing enough the engineers working directly on the song were on board. We have to remember that this is a time where many of the audio engineers on a project literally wore lab coats! OK, so in reality it was more about the cables being dirty but beyond that they were still protecting nice suits under the lab coats so there's just a different and far more serious/scientific process and vibe from recording back then. We were lucky to have people like George Martin bridge the gap between science and art to bring us some truly breakthrough audio techniques.

[carlaz]

(After all, the crazily distorted guitar tone on the Beatles' "Revolution" was achieved by running DI guitar into two violently overloaded console preamps in series.)

I would love to have seen the looks on the faces of the EMI engineers when they did this.

For what it's worth, Geoff Emerick recalls the scene in some detail in his memoir Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. Basically, Emerick was dealing with a tremendously irritable Lennon who wanted tremendously loud and distorted guitar sounds -- though nothing Emerick had come up with so far had been satisfying him:

• "Actually, I had an idea I wanted to try—one that I thought might satisfy John, even though it was equipment abuse of the most severe kind. Because no amount of mic preamp overload had been good enough for him, I decided to try to overload two of them patched together, one into the other. As I knelt down beside the console, turning knobs that I was expressly forbidden from touching because they could literally cause the console to overheat and blow up, I couldn’t help but think: If I was the studio manager and saw this going on, I’d fire myself."

Anyway, there's no T-RackS emulation of the REDD console gear used in with the majority of the Beatles' recordings, though there are both free and paid versions from other manufacturers. That said, you can of course get similar effects from overloading other sorts of mic/console preamps. IMO, the Neve-types work pretty well for this purpose, and AmpliTube 5 seems to have a "based on Neve 1081" gear model derived from the corresponding T-RackS model. I have that as well as the "based on Neve 1073" T-RackS model and you can certainly get some dirt from them by cranking up the input gain.

[tortoisegd]

I know this is an old post, but I had to chime in. I think one element people are overlooking in dissecting John McVie's Rumours bass sound is the recording console, which is said to have been an API mixing console with 550A equalizers. A further component to the sound would have been added during the process of mixing, which *MAY* have been done at Wally Heider Recording in Los Angeles (not San Francisco), where Ken Callait was comfortable mixing at. It's not as simple as just saying that the sound is only contributed to a cryptic Fatbox direct box that no one knows anything about, because its designer wants to mystify as some sort of "magical box".

[carlaz]

Good points. And -- for what it's worth -- T-RackS does have a modeled API 550A EQ unit: the EQ-PA.