I recorded the bass tracks for Spoon For a Knife over a few days playing along with Alan Dowling for most tracks, except for Drunk which was a fretless bass overdub.
for about half the tracks I knew the tunes as we had been playing them live but the other half were literally "here's the chart...it goes sorta like this" as Barrie Sorensen and Mike Ross were actively writing charts/lyrics, etc for the tunes specifically for the recording process.
I used the upright bass I was borrowing from UPEI at the time and my formerly owned '97 japanese offwhite fretless Fender jazz bass.
this was essentially my first studio recording experience ( i.e. other than 4 track recordings with previous bands ) .. it was a learning process for sure. Had no idea whether to sit or stand up..whether to plug into an amp or go direct, I had nothign really to base it off... so I took direction from Perry and Barrie, etc.
In the end I'm pretty happy with the tracks... The upright sound was decent and did the trick. The fretless bass line for drunk ended up pretty groovy and even got to sneak in a couple harmonics in the slow section.
It's interesting to listen to it over a decade later and hear a lot of naivety and inexperience in my playing. I was all over the map with regards to time.. pushing here, pulling there..not always or often in a good way.
Still it made people dance ( my prime objective as a bass player ) so it couldn't have been as bad as I make it out to be.