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Best way/tips to record upright?

Tele295

Tele295

Jan 8, 2002
145
9
Ventura, CA
www.jillmartini.com
#1
We just finished an album with a fantastic upright player [he is a member here:) ] and the bass sound is....good.

I think it could be better, and stand out in the mix more. We have little to no percussion, so the bass carries both the percussion (slaps) and the bass line. It is all pizzicato; recording arco would be a different trick. Rest of the album is ukulele and and steel guitar, light hand percussion here and there.

Are there any particular EQ tricks to recording/mixing pizz upright? We’re using 2 good studio mics (sennheiser, I think), and a direct line off the pickup. The urb is an important voice, so I really want the lines to stand out.

Thanks in advance.
 
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#4
If you've already finished recording, then you don't need recording advice. You need mixing help.

First thing to do in mixing is make absolutely sure the three mic and pickup signals are perfectly time aligned. Zoom all the way in on those three tracks and drag them until the peaks are all happening at exactly the same time. You'll find that the mics are delayed about 1 millisecond for every foot they were away from the bass as compared to the piezo.

If you were smart, you would have had one mic near an f hole and the other pointed at the end of the fingerboard. That will get you a lot of low end out of one and more percussive sounds out of the other. But we don't know if that's what you did.
 
#5
Neck pickups are nice for catching the slap. A piezo works well as it's mostly percussive on the neck, Piezo's have a property of changing tone when you adjust how much pressure they are clamped on with. Something many don't see to take advantage of.

You might also find putting an additional mic on the back of the bass helpful. There's a lot of "Acoustic" sound off the back.
 
#7
IF you want the recorded track to sound like the bass, a single decent-quality cardioid (or figure-of-eight, if you're in a nice room) about 3 feet away from the bass, height between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge. That's it.

Using three tracks for bass is actually likely to diminish the bass's presence in the mix.
 
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#8
if you use multiple mics and tracks think for a moment before you think you can just blend them together. The mics are at different placements and there will be different phases. Frequency emphasis will also be different. Direct mixing could easily null out certain frequencies where you might think they'd reinforce.
There are many 'Phase' VST plugins that can help with this. Many DAWs allow you to nudge a track ahead of behind to adjust for some phase. It may be one mic works great, but then you can add another to pick up the slaps more than tone, ...
Tracks are cheap, record a few and listen to them all and listen if one has any advantages over the others.
 
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#11
AGCurry said:
IF you want the recorded track to sound like the bass, a single decent-quality cardioid (or figure-of-eight, if you're in a nice room) about 3 feet away from the bass, height between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge. That's it.
Click to expand...

Same setup with a true omni (RE55 or SM80) has always worked great on URB for me. And just for fun, I’d surround it with Studio Traps to record in a reproducible sub space.

Otto
 

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