{"id":11760,"date":"2017-11-06T06:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/?p=11760"},"modified":"2017-11-22T12:41:43","modified_gmt":"2017-11-22T17:41:43","slug":"louis-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/article\/louis-johnson.html","title":{"rendered":"How to capture the Louis Johnson bass tone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Louis Johnson is a bass player I can absolutely guarantee you&#8217;ve heard before, even if you didn&#8217;t know his name.<\/p>\n<p>Ever heard Michael Jackson&#8217;s <em>Thriller<\/em>? Louis Johnson is on bass there. And <em>Billie Jean<\/em> from the same album? Louis Johnson again.<\/p>\n<p>And although Johnson&#8217;s session work has been heard in many other places, he was also in the band The Brothers Johnson that scored a few big hits. One of them was <em>Stomp!<\/em>, heard below:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tPBDMihPRJA?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Stomp!<\/em> is a very good example of the era&#8217;s shifting music tastes. 1980 was the year the song was released, and at that time, many disco bands were desperately trying to reinvent themselves after the fallout of the disco music genre (in America, people were really hating disco in 1980.)<\/p>\n<p>What bands like The Brothers Johnson did was put more concentration on jazz and funk that, in essence, made the sound more musical. You can definitely still hear the disco vibe, but edged towards being more R&amp;B. And it worked.<\/p>\n<h3>How do you get that early &#8217;80s bass tone?<\/h3>\n<p>We&#8217;ll start with the gear.<\/p>\n<p>R&amp;B bass tone in the early &#8217;80s was still late-&#8217;70s tone. Bassists of the era didn&#8217;t just all throw out their &#8217;70s basses once the year turned to 1980. Most kept what they had and simply changed their sound.<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Stomp!<\/em>, you&#8217;ll hear both finger style bass lines and slap bass later in the song. Achieving both tones heard with a P-Bass would be difficult. You will have an easier time getting the sound if you have a bass with humbuckers or P\/J.<\/p>\n<p>So in other words, whether you have a Fender Jazz Bass or a Music Man StingRay or any number of other basses, that helps &#8211; especially when switching back and forth from finger style to slap.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some pickup choices that will help you out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/aguilar-pj\">Aguilar P\/J Bass Pickups<\/a>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/bart-j1\">Bartolini 9J1<\/a>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/emg-mmcs\">EMG MMCS<\/a>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/emg-35csx\">EMG 35CSX<\/a>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/nord-nj4\">Nordstrand NJ4<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Clean play with bone dry recording<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Something you won&#8217;t hear a lot of is fret clack, fret buzz, overdrive, distortion or compression (with the exception of natural compression produced by a speaker cabinet.) The bass playing style heard is super clean and very tight.<\/p>\n<p>A carryover recording technique from the late &#8217;70s is that the bass is recorded bone dry. You don&#8217;t hear a thing other than bass notes. Not even natural studio room reverb can be heard. The bass was either recorded DI or the old school &#8220;wall of foam&#8221; technique was used to purposely isolate the tone to be as absolutely dry as possible.<\/p>\n<p>The easier of the two is, of course, just to use DI dry.<\/p>\n<p><strong>No-treble fingerstyle with emphasis on mids, and all-treble slap with scooped mids<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll notice in <em>Stomp!<\/em> that when the bass changes from fingers to slap, it&#8217;s a rather drastic tone change.<\/p>\n<p>The finger style is mid-heavy, no treble whatsoever and rolled off bass frequencies. Then when the slap comes in, the treble is punched up, the mids are punched <em>way<\/em> down and the bass frequencies brought up.<\/p>\n<p>Can you do this kind of drastic tone change yourself? Yes, but it does take some experimentation to pull it off live. This is an instance where having a bass that can be played both passive and active could help out greatly. Passive for the finger style, and when it&#8217;s time for the slap, on goes the preamp to punch in the sound you need instantly. Or if you can dial it in while playing live, you may be able to nail the tone change using a passive bass.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Important note:<\/strong> Most early &#8217;80s R&amp;B songs don&#8217;t do drastic bass tone changes as heard in <em>Stomp!<\/em> That song is one of the more unique kind where they just threw in two very different bass tones in the same recording.<\/p>\n<h3>Early &#8217;80s bass R&amp;B tone is very much a modern sound (even today!)<\/h3>\n<p>This tone is not something you&#8217;re going to get out of a vintage Fender bass. More specifically, chasing after this sound using vintage &#8217;50s or &#8217;60s hardware be it original or reproduction will lead to frustration quickly.<\/p>\n<p>It is absolutely OK to use humbuckers, noiseless pickups, preamps and so on for getting the &#8217;80s R&amp;B bass sound. Many bassists of the time were very much using newer instrument technologies. <\/p>\n<p>Said another way, it&#8217;s not a sin to put aside the vintage and embrace the modern here.<\/p>\n<p>Happy tone chasing!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Louis Johnson is a bass player I can absolutely guarantee you&#8217;ve heard before, even if you didn&#8217;t know his name. Ever heard Michael Jackson&#8217;s Thriller? Louis Johnson is on bass there. And Billie Jean from the same album? Louis Johnson again. And although Johnson&#8217;s session work has been heard in many other places, he was &#8230; <a title=\"How to capture the Louis Johnson bass tone\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/article\/louis-johnson.html\" aria-label=\"More on How to capture the Louis Johnson bass tone\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":11759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11760"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11760\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bestbassgear.com\/ebass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}