I’m going to start in my area of speciality: where else but in the bass place? Doing justice to the sound of the bass guitar is one of the hardest things to get right whatever you’re recording, whether it be tin-pot little demos or your shiny new multi-million pound major-label debut. How do you get it to sound crunchy, ominous, crackling with energy and yet still retain that bowel-rumbling intensity that is so important to carry the weight, the heart, the balls of a recording? This is really my ongoing quest, my Holy Grail in many ways, so it’s something I’m keen to explore with the nio 2/4.

Obviously I can’t expect to reproduce the sound of my beloved Ashdown double 8×10 cab rig going through something as teeny-weeny as the nio, but there are some things I can do to compensate, or at least ways to explore alternatives. This, like many things when it comes to recording, is really about trial and error. Or more accurately for me, seeing what you can get away with before things start blowing up.

I never use a pick live, but I’ve had to concede without the sheer blow-your-head-off amp power of my live set-up sometimes you can’t always get the same definition and attack at a more modest volume with just fingertips. A pick gives the option of an extra edge of definition which can make all the difference going into your laptop. It depends what kind of sound you’re going for. The sound I’ve perfected over our first couple of records is quite a clean sound, with bite, but one that relies on a fair bit of subtlety that comes from the tips of my fingers. Now I’m trying out quite a caustic, distorted sound and also some more synthetic sounds, so the pick brings an interesting clank to the tone.

I’m using one of my trusty spare Fender Precision basses, the powerhouse of the bass world - now and always my model of choice. I could do another column about that, but for now let’s just say it’s the sturdiest (boy it needs to be with the thrashing I give the thing), most reliable of guitars and I think it kind of understands me. I should point out however that I think being a trainspotter about models of guitar isn’t necessarily the key to getting a sound that you like when recording in this way: in my view the nio is versatile enough to get something workable whatever you plug into it. It might need a bit tweaking, but that’s the skill of recording like this. After all, it’s not about replicating a bass sound you’ve already got, it’s about building something out of nothing. The ‘x’ factor might be a particular guitar for you, but for me it’s about the challenge of creating something unique. The trashier the guitar, the bigger the challenge, right?

So what are you options for sound? Well, here’s where you have to start playing around with nioFxRack. The default sounds are as good as any place to start. ‘Bass Fat’ was a decent kick-off for my needs, but by accident I ended up on ‘Guitar Clean Jazz’ which doesn’t sound too auspicious but turns out to be chunky with a nice edge to it. For levels going into the nio, I find you have to be fairly careful with clipping on bass (it’s not quite so key with guitar sounds), but as a rule, the dirtier the noise you’re after the more free-and-easy you can be with clipping. As I said before, trial and error is key. Push it, see what happens. Hit things at random. It’s not very scientific, but if you don’t allow yourself a margin for experimentation then you never discover anything with these kind of tools. To be honest with you, I don’t know what half the buttons on the ‘Focusrite Compressor’ do, but you learn by twiddling. I’m not a big fan of piling in effects and with the nioFxRack you can at least see very easily just how many modules you’re going through, since it’s designed to look like a real effects rack. Another benefit of this layout is that it’s very simple just to turn off whole effects or modules, which helps you work out what, if anything, each one is adding to the sound. If in doubt, scrap it and start again. For a basic sound, I stole the EQ settings from ‘Bass Fat’, added them to ‘Clean Jazz’ and then turned my input level on the nio down to iron out some of the pops and scrapes. Bingo!

Next time: getting results with Ableton Live. It’s time for less chat and more music…