I’ve been recording with my guitar into my Motif for sometime and I just bought a bass a few weeks and have already started recording but I want to start using some external effects. Should I start mic’ing my guitars and recording/sampling into the Motif?

When I use my bass and play in the slap style, the tone is thick, bright and full but when I try to do the fingered (James Jamerson) style it sounds muddy and muffled.

The reason I like recording into the Motif is because I like to have control over everything before I start to track out.

When you say “track out” what are you tracking out into?

It could well be that the device (computer, stand alone HD recorder etc) coudl have it sown effects and so on which may offer further variety.

Regarding the muffled sound versus the bright sound, that is in huge part due to the difference in the sound out of the bass. Slapping does produce more HF content. If you are picking with your fingers, then it will be a rounder, smoother less bright sound. You can adjust the tone on your bass to compensate.

Cheers

Thank you for your help as usual.

O.K....this is going to sound complicated, but you can “pick” (joke) it up in no time. As you know, each user voice can use up to 4 “elements”. Each element can be a fully edited Motif waveform or sample waveform. Record 4 different strokes (slap, muffled, etc. as samples , each on their own waveform. Then assign each waveform to a user voice element. In each element, you will have full control over all aspects of modifying that sample waveform, as if you were creating any Motif sound from scratch. But here’s the killer: On the oscillator window for each element, you have a tab called “LIMIT”. There, you can set up the velocity sensitivity range of each of your bass strokes AND how they cross fade. These parameters, along with the AMPLITUDE VELOCITY SENSITIVITY parameters, will help you to flow seamlessly from stroke to accent, etc, by how fast or hard you hit a key on the keyboard. For example, the harder you hit a key, the brighter the sound of that particular sample will be be. Then if you really want to get into it, you can use the Motif’s extensive realtime modulation controls, pitch bend, etc.
Well, that’s enough to get you started!
Have fun. You will be surprised to find how close the expressiveness of your playing bass guitar on a keyboard can be! I’ve done it with lots of sampled acoustic instruments with complex intonations.
Have fun!