Upright Bass

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bdemenil

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I've been doing some live recordings with an upright bass. The bass player insisted i mic below the bridge. I didn't get good sound - very watery without definition. Can anyone advise me on mic placement, eq, and compression? of acoustic upright bass? Its for a latin band recording live (can't mic too far out). Thanks
 
Memories! In 1 of my old jazz bands,I experimented with
mic positioning as I also was not satisfied with the mic-bridge position, I found the most natural tone by mic'ing either the left or right cleft openings on the upright which produced a sweet, bottom-resonating,acoustical sound. Another mic pos. I used was pointing the mic directly, halfway between the bottom of the neck and the bridge straight on. This produced a low,sharper tone. My role model when I started playing Upright,Charles Mingus,stated in an old edition of DownBeat magazine, that on some of his later recordings,that his preferred mic pos was having a mic behind the uprite as close to the body as possible with out touching,as the tone he wanted was a deep,hollow bottom, foreging note-clarity, to match the mood,flow and tonality of the music he was playing.
In short,the best advice is experimenation.Try as many diff positions to achieve the sound you are looking for.
BTW,what kind of mic are you using? And is the Upright fingered or bowed?
 
The upright is fingered, and I'm using the AKG C 3000. I also have a rode nt1 and an AKG C 535 which i could use for this. What kind of mic do you recomend?
 
I've only used a SMack58 and a KSM32L.
Like the 58 better!
 
saw some one who plain taped a sm57 in one of the holes and in myopnion that bass blew away ANY electric bass. oh it was psychorockabilly music.

guhlenn
 
"As there is no proximity effect with these mics, you can get as close as you dare to the sound source. I once actually stuck a TC40K inside the F-hole of a contrabass. Whoa!"

That was Lionel Dumond from ProRec talking, and talking about one interesting use of an Earthworks mic. I'd like to see you get an SM58 in the f-hole of an upright, Q. Ouch!

Lemme know if the NT1 sounds good on the big fiddle. I'd love to get involved with an upright here. I'm not talking code. :D
 
Hey dob, I never stuck a mic inside any of the cleft openings of the Uprite as the way I played, I treated the bass as an excercise tool and dance partner! I would spin the bass around, do some dips etc. and if I had a mic inside, the sounds of the mic rattling inside would be unnerving. So I just pointed the SMack at either of the left or rite clefts and took it from there.
I did once taped a mic to the back of the bass on the middle to achieve that Milt Hinton/Charles Mingus boomy growl tone, but I could not duplicate that sound.
If only I had an NT back then.........
 
Mic Placement

You flolk are all going to think i'm crazy. What the heck it worked. I played dog house bass with a bluegrass band and tried every thing. Nothing seemed to work. On day for kicks i took a set of pioneer se-l-40 ear phones and placed on directly under the tail piece as low as I could get it and the other I taped to the upper bout. I run each int seperate channels and the mix gave me what I wanted. Fought the screaming for a while but finally re wired the the ear phones out of phase so they wouldnt feed back off each other. Yea I'm crazy but it worked for me.
 
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