yyz isolated bass track

A friend alerted me to this cool recording of just the bass track from Rush's song "YYZ" from their album Moving Pictures.

The interesting thing about this is that the isolated track shows that they were recording it not only live but in the same space. They're miking the bass amp, and the mic picks up the drums and guitar.

Especially interesting is the cymbal bleed: usually you roll off some of the highest frequencies of a bass track but these are all there, or at least not rolled off completely — that's how you get the nice edge from hitting the string against the pickup, one of the signature bass timbres of this album.

Also, you realize that the bass amp is right in the room, picking up those guitar and drum sounds — not in an isolation closet somewhere. Back then, you often had the band in one room (if it was a rock-n-roll band), but they were listening through phones, and the guitar and bass amps were off somewhere stuffed into closets. Doing it this way, though, actually in the same room, gives you that indefinable open-air feeling. Nice!!

 (Also, notice that they cut out Alex's [still rather inexpert] 16th-note Van-Halen-ish fill when they punched him in. Hah!)