your question:

03/12/2024 Sebastian

Hi Trevor!
First of all, nice work on King Buzzo's Gift of sacrifice! Love how the your lines doesn't follow/copy the guitar riffs all the time and have their own approach.
I want to ask you on your tone/EQ approach on the later Mr. Bungle record, as is always challenging to cut through metal guitar distortions. How you worked with them on where to cut/boost? Specially on mid frequencies. By the way, nice to hear metal bass that is not dingwall+darkglass like a lot of recent recordigs!

my answer:

Thanks for noticing my use of counterpoint. Unison is great some of the time, but not all of the time.
I can’t talk about my tone on that album without mentioning our mixing engineer Jay Ruston, who is a bass player himself. He really brought out the natural sound of my bass and found it’s place amongst the saturated guitars. I’m not sure what he did EQ-wise as this was done during those remote operational times. I used my Pbass for the entire record and found a Verellen Meat Smoke amp in the studio. I’d never used one before, but the Ampeg I wanted didn’t have a master volume and I wasn’t able to use it as we were all in the same room (save for the drums). I make it a point when I play metal to not use too much distortion. I try to get a good, healthy tub grit. But as you may know, distortion on bass typically sucks out the low end, not to mention, the guitars have it covered! So, a cleaner tone makes more sense to me.