How I Got That Sound: Richard Chycki

Multi‑platinum mixer and engineer Richard Chycki has worked with rock royalty such as Aerosmith, Dream Theater, Mick Jagger, Alice Cooper, Def Leppard and Canadian legends Rush. Asked to dissect a particularly memorable part he’s worked on, Richard details how he got Geddy Lee’s bass sound on ‘Caravan’, from the 2012 Rush album Clockwork Angels.

Fourfold Root

“Ged’s bass tone on the recording is comprised of four channels of bass. Rather than relying on a single channel of bass and then EQ’ing it and compressing it to achieve the final outcome, the combined four channels act to voice the bass by blending the four bass channels, which sound very different from one another.

“First, Ged’s bass is split using a Radial guitar splitter. It uses Jensen transformers and isolates the outputs from one another without compromising the bass tone whatsoever. The first channel is a clean‑clean track that uses an...