Sounds like a Fender Jazz bass with round wound strings played with a pick to me.
The whole sound set is cheap 80ies standard - from drums to bass to synth. In that time thousands of songs and commercials were made with that typical FM bass sound. Here is a short video of Dexed, a DX7 simulation, which shows quite good what its all about.
Too young!! I wish. I'm 65. Played professionally from the 70's into the 90's. Played a 1962 Fender Jazz with RotoSound stings through an Ampeg SVT doing opening acts for Little Feat, Dixie Dregs, Eddie Money, Henry Paul and the Outlaws, etc... It may be a DX but doesn't sound that way to me - a lot of the other sounds yes but not the bass.
Oh yeah for this track it's a drop D tuning doing the D to D octave thing in the beginning.
Okay, it was just a guess or a guessed explanation.
To me its not relevant if you are to young or to old to know about the 80ies FM-synths. And 65 is the new 45. But you should recognize that this bass sound is so sterile and even sounding that it never ever could be a hand played Fender Bass. Yes, its impossible to hear if its a DX7 or another FM Synth or a sample from Emulator or Emax I or even a sample based synth like M1 or similar. But the probability is very, very high it was a DX.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wikipedia.de
...Herbolzheimer und Kofler komponierten den Synthiepop-Song Hexen und nahmen ihn unter dem Bandnamen Ecco auf...
Its a synthpop song from 1987/88. Everything sounds exactly like 80ies synthpop which was dominated by FM-sounds. Those two musicians were more like hobby compositors who made only two songs with their band Ecco. They were no Rock or Jazz musicians with amazing playing skills who thought: "Well, lets do everything with plain stupid synth sounds, except the bass. Because we want to show the world how robotique a Fender Jazz Bass can sound!"
No. Of course not. So what else should I mention to convince you?
OK - you know more about these folks than I. TBH I listened to the first 16 bars and not the whole tune. But in the 80 there were some very good players who could maintain even tone and volume. Lee Sklar, Nathan East, Sting, Jaco, Gary Willis, Tony Levin, John Taylor, Louis Johnson, Rocco Prestia, and on and on.
I can reproduce this sound on a real bass, but it’s time to move on. I have another Monkey House tune to learn.
pick + low string action with level frets (important for nice fast transient string buzz at start of note, but not after), and either bridge pickup with a bass and mids boost EQ or neck pickup with high mids/treble boost. I find blended pickups don't achieve this sound because it rounds out the timbre.
And, obviously, new roundwound strings. That is the first thing to any good 'piano' tone on bass.
You can also detune your strings so they are floppy and slap the crap out of them and tune back up, this will give you about 30mins of 'like new' sound. Hear for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8OYeN9mAL4
I've used this trick before gigs when I used to play roundwounds.