Bass Guitar compression

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Hello good people. This isn’t strictly speaking about Ardour perhaps but I was wondering if anyone can advise anyway on some basic compressor settings. I am running Ubuntu Studio for what that’s worth, and have quite a lot of compressors to choose from. I’m not a great bass player however and so am looking for some sort of basic recommendations for taming my dynamics somewhat for a rock song mostly made up of quarter notes w/pick. The bass is plugged directly into a 1/4" input on a Mackie Mixer before sent to the computer. What compressor plug in do you use and how do you set it?

Thanks!

#2

LSP kompressor mono is my goto for bass. you can adjust the threshold for both Attack and Release + a wet/dry mix for a smooth transparent compression

#3

My swiss army knife for both guitar and bass is DYN500 from overtonedsp.co.uk. The look and feel is very much like analog equipment. For bass I’m using a compression ratio of no more than 3:1, threshold -10dB, attack 0.1 ms, release around 300ms.

#4

Bassist who primarily plays with fingers and slap here, and I wanna second the LSP Compressor Mono recommendation. The LSP plugins in general are banging and will do almost all of the tone shaping you need if you’re not wanting anything too dirty/effected or don’t want an amp sim.

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