recording bass guitar - strange problem

[trispectrum]

hi all,

I've been playing around with recording a bass guitar direct with no amp just recording line in. (passing through a high impedance preamp first) When I look at the recording in Soundforge I notice that interestingly enough the signal seems to favor the bottom half of the dynamic range. In other words the signal peaks noticeably higher on one side of -infinity dB. I hope you get what I'm saying.

I know this sounds like a DC offset problem but when no notes are played on the bass the signal is solidly on -inf Db. There appears to be no offset. I've tried asking people about this before but I could never really get an answer as to what's going on or how to solve the problem. Obviously if one side of the dynamic range isn't roughly level with the other the signal won't be as loud before I start clipping.

I'm fairly inexperienced when it comes to recording audio but I hope someone knows what I'm talking about. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've noticed this problem before. Thanks!

[Steve Newton]

In other words the signal peaks noticeably higher on one side of -infinity dB. I hope you get what I'm saying.

I know this sounds like a DC offset problem but when no notes are played on the bass the signal is solidly on -inf Db

It's just very low frequency action. What causes it depends on the gear used, or even plug ins used - I get a severe version of this when using the otherwise awsome SupaPhaser plug in.

Use one of SF's filters/EQs to get rid of everything below 20hz and see the wave form snap back to being centered on "0".

There's a preset for just this situation in the paragraphic EQ I think.