roman_sub

Fast payment and nice comms, even despite postage screw-up on my part. Deal with confidence

One of the most beautiful fretless basses I've seen. I was ogling it when it was on Jon's website - in fact came close to buying it in 2017 I think.... So sorry you had so much stress over it. Hope you fall back in love with it!

Cheap valve pre’s Normally have tubes running at low voltages, so not really getting the best out of them. The sound may be bit harsh (and definitely more noisy than your interface preamps) but if you like the colour it gives, go for it. Don’t forget that transistor designs (eg any Neve 1073 type design - eg Golden Age Preamp Pre73 being one of the most affordable) can also give a very pleasing warmth / saturation. If you can find one at a similar price, i’d Take one over a tube preamp at the same price point. It is a rabbit hole though: the outboard preamp by itself may get you closer to the ‘polished studio sound’ - but then there’s EQ, compressor (or two), hardware reverb etc etc. Point being: decide what and how you ultimately want to record. Most interfaces these days have preamps that would be acceptable even for any level of recording project. If you want just a bit more colour, it could be nice to have something different - it won’t be the final and only piece of kit you need for the sound ‘in your head’ but if it inspires better performances it’s worth it.... if you do end up getting it, try to run it though line inputs (generally no need to run signal through two separate mic pres).

Even though it’s a close-mic’ing system (looks like something you mount over the F hole?), try to find a room / space in the room that sounds best when you are playing - you are still recording an acoustic instrument, in a space. It’s nice to capture some of the fingerboard slap, so another mic may give more options if you are missing the ‘attack’ there - but then watch out for how the mics interact. even better to record in a nice sounding room with a decent omni mic at about 1m away, though that’s getting closer to studio, not home recording! otherwise general tips apply, watch out that levels don’t clip the input - you can easily leave 6db of headroom; no need to get as close as possible to 0db.

It does sound like the drummer didn’t play to the standard of accuracy that the tracking engineer/ producer wanted. Moving kick, snare and time aligning fills generally sounds like your drummer was having timing issues that wouldn’t get better with more takes. If so, editing would have been a better use of time, rather than having drummer record more and more takes with the same issues. Though, It is also possible the person doing the editing wanted a perfect metronomic, grid-aligned performance (and overdid the editing) - and maybe original drum performances were actually usable in their own way, but the character of drums was fundamentally changed as a result! tough one to call without being there... if you’re happy with the result that’s what matters.

Without being rude, if you want to use the buss compressor regularly, I wouldn’t really recommend any of those units - nor do I think you would be likely to find a particularly good one within stated budget. If you just want clean and boring, FMR unit may do the job well enough. for character compression or something to ‘inspire’ mixing you’d likely need to spend more on SSL clone. But, to be honest, £300 would probably be better spent somewhere else in the studio.