I found this interesting: Here is Glenn Hughes's (don't be fooled by the Roger Glover pic) isolated bass track from Burn:
And here is his predecessor Roger Glover with his bass track on Highway Star:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mLryrT1ZMc&feature=relatedNeither bass track is perfect (nor does it need to be, nor would it sound perfect if I had played it), but Glenn is quite a bit sloppier than Roger and less tight! It's not surprising as Glenn has a reputation to be impatient in the studio and leave after the second take while Glover - the producer in him - immerses himself in the recording studio world.
Other than the obvious "uhum uhum" connection, which is the sole reason why I am posting this, the recordings are only about two years apart and were created with the same producer (Martin Birch), known for mixing the bass up quite prominently (just ask Steve Harris, Birch did the early Iron Maiden stuff too). And they are both undeniably Ric though Hughes' (probably in a conscious move to emulate Glover) 4001 is a different one to Glover's. Hughes didn't play the Ric for long though, he reverted to his beloved P Bass midway in the Burn tour.
I always found that the bass on Burn is the least audible on any seventies DP album, those two isolated tracks reveal why: Hughes had sub-bass and crisp to distorted attack, but was thin on the mids where Glover is prominent. The Burn bass track is not a typical Birch eq either, he generally adds a lot more mids to a bass sound (like on the Whitesnake albums with Murray). Which is strange because
Blackmore's ooops, whatshisname's radical amp setting (full treble, full bass, all mids cut or even removed in the wiring) allowed any bass player quite a bit of "mid room". When the Burn remaster came out a couple of years ago, I hoped that Hughes' scooped bass sound had been tweaked somewhat, but unfortunately not so. You still don't hear him as well as Glover even though Hughes is the much more aggressive player and tends to be ahed of the beat clamoring for attention while Glover settles in. The neo-classical melodic chorus bit Hughes plays around 47 sec of his bass track for the first time sounds exactly like the type of guitar backing B... darn! "the guitarist in Glenn's band at the time" preferred, I doubt that Glenn came up with it, it his not his style at all, he is a pentatonic man at heart who avoids classical scales.
Who/what do you guys prefer?