# Behemoth bass tone! Help!



## Sumsar (Jan 20, 2018)

Hi!

I am currently recording / mixing my bands second album, which is a kinda blackened death metal style, though with more focus on the black part.

I really want to get a tone close to the one that Orion has on the latest Behemoth album - The Satanist.

I have been googling through a couple of threads from other forums but I couldn't really find much help, so please help me in how to get a similar tone!

Particularly I am looking for something like this:


There does not seem to be much 'making of' from the making of this album, but there is a bit from the previous album where he does go over some of the bass gear:




The tone is different between the two albums, but I figured that the elements are somewhat the same?

What I found so far with my own experimentation is that it envolves the following:
- Humbucker bass pickups. Either both neck and bridge combined or just the neck PU
- Overdrive, probably something like a sansamp or a darkglass
- It seems to work well to both add some drive on the OD but also on whatever vst amp, so that you get a sort of staged OD.

I cant really figure out the following:
- what EQ moves to make? It is not the traditional mid scoop it seems to me?
- should I use some IR of a bass or guitar cab to get this sound?
- should I split the sound to also have a clean low part as is often seen?
- should I do any of the 'run it through a guitar amp to get distortion' trick, or will the OD from a sansamp vst be enough?
- how do i compress it in a way that it stays consistent without being totally squashed?

Any help is greatly appreciated
Thanks!


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## ofu (Jan 20, 2018)

Pretty recent rig rundown, hope it helps you. Heard Behemoth a few times, last was in 2016, I think Orion used the same rig, sound was B7K direct out I guess (have one, think I can recognise it). I think he used his amp for monitoring mainly.

However, Orion is a beast of a player, but nailing bass tone is tricky. Recorded 10 songs with my band last year in our practice room, worst part was nailing the bass and guitar tone and matching them. Hope the video helps.


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## Sumsar (Jan 21, 2018)

Thanks for that, hadn't seen that.

From what I can see his chain is:
Bass (neck and bridge PU combined) -> tc electronics spectercomb compressor -> aguilar agro bass OD -> darkglass B7K -> front of house / bass amp

I don't have any of those things, but just knowing the chain can get me a little further.
I notice that:
- The darkglass do not do any cab simulation, so FOH gets the direct out of the darkglass. Maybe I should try mixing bass tones without any cabinet IR in the chain?
- He both gets some drive from the darkglass but also has a bass OD in front of that, so guess I am gonna try out every vst OD ever made to see if I can find something close to the aguilar agro.
- From the settings on the darkglass I can see that he is boosting lows and high mids and cutting highs and low mids, so I have to try something like that.

Now to find some youtube vids of the aguilar agro, because I have no idea what it sounds like.

Will update when/if I learn more 

Edit: and while the aguilar ODs the entire signal, the darkglass blends the signal, so I have to think about that as well.


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## Chiba666 (Jan 21, 2018)

I know he uses Markbass amps prior to the B7K as well as the Tech 21 Bass RBI


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## Winspear (Jan 23, 2018)

Based on what you have said and my experience, I would try it without a cab IR yes. I generally prefer the cab IR to reinforce the low end, and I'd do so with a clean split. So clean split going perhaps 50% pure and 50% cab IR. Top end distortion with low end rolled off and no cab IR - however some lowpass to clean it up may be desired. I would do a low mid cut for sure, slightly higher than you have in your guitars.


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## Sumsar (Jan 23, 2018)

I have experimented a bit further.

I actually found that using Nollys approach to bass tone can get you in the Orion ballpark if you dial in a bit less distortion. I have used the approach explained in the following:



He mentions that he tracks through a b7k on the way in. I don't have that, but I started instead with the TSE BOD to add a slight bit of grith and preamp color. Then compression and into the fabfilter saturn similar to what he does. I don't have the exact same IR that he uses, but through experimentation I found that the trick was to find an IR that didn't cut too much mid range (a lot of bass cab IRs seem to do this) and then boost the highs a lot and broadly .. like 5 - 10 db around 8K.

So now I am actually pretty satisfied with by bass tone .. it is not exact what either Nolly nor Orion has, but it is fairly close. Now I then realize that my guitar tone does not really fit the bass tone, so I have to do some more work on that. I will post some examples a bit further down the line.

Thanks for all the input, please keep it coming


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