Animals As Leaders mastermind Tosin Abasiw as recently Interviewed by The Ex-Man Podcast. When asked why AAL do not have a bassist, he said:
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“There’s actually no real story [on why we ended up without a bassist]. It was like Misha [Mansoor], when he was recording me [for Animals as Leaders’ 2009 self-titled debut album], he had a process of not really using a bass guitar but using the pitch shifter in Cubase. He would track the riff on clean guitar, single-note versions of the riff, so as if you’re playing bass on clean guitar, and then he would pitch it down an octave.
“And I think it created kind of a fundamental sort of subby sort of bass that just worked with his mixes. So we were able to produce the first album with no bass guitar but there are bass frequencies because you can’t have a mix without that.
“We knew we were gonna run tracks because I really like the synth players. We’d be playing to a click and we’d be running tracks. And then it was like the bass parts weren’t really anything other than foundational. So we started rehearsing before we found a bass player. We were using the backing tracks for synth and bass.
