by carlaz » Mon Jan 15, 2018 3:20 pm
Maybe you could be a bit more specific in terms of particular players and/or recorded examples? There are various different bands that might be considered djent, and not all the bass players in all those bands do the same kind of thing.
That said, for just some starting ideas ....
Much depends on what the guitars are doing; you don't want the bass to be overlapping too much with the guitars' frequency range. So if there are scooped guitars, or maybe with a lot of low end in the guitar tone (which is a pretty djenty kind of thing), you'll want plenty of midrange (and top end). Alternatively, if the guitars are midrangey, and more scooped bass tone may work.
Either way, various bass players may use a "traditional" bass amp or DI for the low end of their tone and a guitar amp for the higher end (or even mid-range). The split signal path options in AT3 (or AT4) let you do this pretty effectively even just within the plugin or standalone app. Simply set up a preset with two paths: one with a heavily driven but not overly bassy guitar amp sound, the other with a clean-ish low-end tone using a bass amp rig or even DI. You can smash the heck out of the low-end path using the built in "Tube Compressor" rack model; the distortion tone from the guitar-amp rig can be left uncompressed or at least more lightly compressed. Then fiddle with the EQ and drive controls (especially on the guitar-amp part of the preset) to decide how much mid and top you need -- but this well, as noted, depend heavily on how you can get the bass to fit in with the guitars, whether you are playing with fingers or pick, or doing a lot of slapping, etc.
If you are recording into a DAW, you can record DI bass and then make two copies of that part: one you can leave as the DI signal, rolling off everything above 200 hz or so, and compress the snot out of it (to create relatively clean, consistent low end); then on the other track, use Amplitube to create a driven midrangey/toppy tone, rolling off everything below 150 hz or so (depending). Blending these two separately processed tracks gives you a bit more control than than what I described doing within Amplitube in the preceding paragraph, but it uses the same basic principle. (Obviously, you could do this by mic'ing a bass amp, too, and combining that with the DI, though then you want to watch for phase issues.)
