recording upright bass

  • Thread starter Thread starter rockabilly1955
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rockabilly1955

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does anybody have any good advice on recording an upright bass? so far the best way for me seems to be one mic pointed near the F hole with no kind of amplification on the bass. The problem i have with this is that it sounds kinda far away, and doesnt mix too well with edited vocals and guitars that are plugged straight to the Fostex mr8. I have a pick up as well, but when i've tried recording with the pick up connected into my fostex mr8, it just sounds bad and distorted. Any ideas??? :cool:
 
If you have a setup that sounds good when you play live (or thru an amp) use a microphone on that. The natural compression of playing thru an amp should minimize that 'far away' sound and should make it much easier to mix.
 
just (finally) got a copy of bunea vista social club, and the picture of the micked bass shows it fairly close, on the lower part of the fret board. center.

usually i have ended up closer to the bridge, but have you eve heard that cd????
(sounds awsome)
 
if you have a ribbon mic, they are supposed to be pretty good for micing upright. I'm about to partake in this situation myself for this jazz intro to a song. I know that you pretty much have to have the preamp for those bass pickups, I used to play upright with those Fishman transducers straight through a bass amp, and damn you really had to tweak the hell out of it to get it to coperate. then I got the fishman preamp with and snap...

Personally I would try running out of the pickup into the pre then into a DI box, along with a mic. Try moving the mic around till you get what you need out of that signal. Then blend the two. That should help. Plus you have the option if one totally sounds better than the other.


I will re-post when I do my little upright adventure.
 
let me know how it goes Kill. We have an Underwood pickup, and we do have a pre amp as well, but that darn pick up picks up all the hand movement on the strings, kinda like a rubbing/sliding noise. I can kinda kill that by adjusting the treble/mids. I think i will try again with the bass hooked up with the pick up and pre amp straight to the Fostex. Maybe use a low gain so the sound doesnt come out distorted. I can always boost the level with my pc software if needed
 
i recorded an upright bass for a jazz thing a little back, and took both the DI signal off of the pickup along with mic'ing the bass...the mic was a U-87 about 18" back, at the middle of the fingerboard - roughly where the 12th fret would be. i used a UA 2-610 preamp, and it sounded awesome. you probably don't have neumann's and UA pres, but a good LDC and any preamp with a lot of gain should work

then on mixdown, i ended up using the mic'd signal mostly for the finger noise and tone, and cut the hell out of the low end...the bass frequencies from the DI'd signal sounded much cleaner to me
 
I have a pretty decent pickup (K&K Bass Max) on my upright, but there is no way I would record it using the pickup. I've never met the pickup that yields the true sound of the URB.

The bass is such a big instrument that if you mic it too close, it won't sound like the bass sounds in the room. My method is to use a figure-of-eight-pattern ribbon mic (I use an AEA R84 or R44, or a Shure 300) and put the bass in another room to minimize bleed into other mics. I position the mic about 3 feet from the bass, pointing approximately at the end of the fingerboard. It it's too close to the f-holes you will get too much boominess.

The figure-of-eight pattern provides the advantage of capturing a lot of the nuance of the way the bass sounds in the room... so you need a decent room.

Like any other instrument, there are some basses which sound great and many which don't sound so good. Don't expect a shitty-sounding bass to record well. Your choice of strings also has a lot to do with the sound! Unfortunately, searching for the right set of strings can be very expensive. I just bought a set of Thomastik-Infeld for around $150...
 
I recorded an upright bass on a country track & ended up using the sound from a D112 on the E&A F-hole

recently recorded using a sennheiser tie clip mic on the same F-hole pointing up the neck. I had a pickup as well but it developed a gremlin between sound check & performance BUT the clip recorded it like a dream :)
 
I clearly have different experiences than most of the above, except for a lot of what AGCurry said.

I find mic'ing the f-hole much too boomy. And I would classify bass pickups as only marginally more desireable to record than acoustic guitar pickups, which I totally hate. The exception would be if the player insists on the sound of the pickup, as opposed to the sound of the instrunment. (Like Ron Carter). Personally, I prefer the sound of the instrument. And recording an upright bass through an amp? Shudder! Might as well just play bass samples on a keyboard.

For a clear articulate sound try putting a large diaphragm condenser mic just below the bridge centered on the strings, somewhere around 6 inches away. I find mic'ing above the bridge gets too much finger noise. More distant mic'ing might be cool, but at my studio the bass is often in the same room as the grand piano, so I tend to mic close to insure more bass and less piano.

The main thing is to make the bass player happy with the recorded sound. If the bass player thinks it sounds like crap, better be prepared to start moving mics around and/or swapping them out. Always check with the players early on in the process - let them hear a trial take through the monitors. Sometimes stuff sounds ok through their headphones, but when it comes time to mix they are disappointed. Better to find out before it's too late.
 
Basically, ur going to get all your boomy lows from the f-holes and more attack and string noise as you get further up the neck.

The approach I would try, would be to mic both the f-hole and the neck, and then blend to taste.

You said the bass sounds distant, but I would normally be even further away then 6 inches. With an acoustic instrument like that, generating such low frequencies you need to give the sound waves time to mature.
 
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