Put some reverb on the bass guitar track, and enjoy!

Cause I bet you have heard the wisdom of not to put reverb on the bass track. And whoever said it was right, cause you can really fuck up the groove with doing that, and turn the low end into a gob of mud. But sometimes you can still do it, the following way:

Paul Young – “No Parlez” – reverb on Pino’s bass track

Listen to the TWO basses (at least one of these tracks was played by the great Pino Palladino on his fretless MusicMan Stingray), from 1:53 into the song.

Dry and reverberated together

There’s indeed a dry bass supplying the low end with a simple, sparse and steadily grooving slap bass line. Then there’s another, lead bass track played and mixed on top of it – i.e. played higher up the neck and high-pass filtered properly – with reverb on it! Also notice the almost endless sustain caused by applying compression with a rather heavy hand.

Sounds nice and unique, and since the arrangement leaves enough space for the two separate bass tracks with not crowding the mix unnecessarily, it works pretty good.