Double Bass In the studio with my StringCharger

[flowinowen]

I bought a Pierre Joseph's String Charger about a year ago and have been loving it. It's got that nice smooth 70's sound I wanted (my favorite players are James Jamerson and NHOP). I finally got to record with it in the studio last week and some interesting things happened with it. First, the dry signal, when compared with the mic signal (we used a Shure bass drum mic, I believe the Beta52a??) looked almost fully compressed. Secondly, I have a line I play similar to Jamerson's octave work. When watching the volume meters, they would sometimes peak at opposite times. The engineer, who was also a bass player, was not happy with this. I don't have a screen shot or the raw sessions yet but I hoped someone could shed some light on this? Has anyone had this happen with a magnetic pickup and is there a way to fix what transients it picks up?

 

[brianrost]

Magnetic pickups will be more compressed than a mike, nature of the beast.

As far as the peaks, I'm not sure what you are describing but either it sounds OK or it doesn't (as opposed to what the meters or waveforms look like). In the digital recording age it seems engineers spend more time looking than listening

 

[sonix]

what you are describing is a different response from two transducers. the behavior is normal since they are two completely different air to voltage converters. the "delay" effect varies with frequency so you can try to observe that at different frequencies.

ofcourse, you can hear the difference.

 

[Champagne]

Don't worry about the waveforms that much. Trust your ears. Use a goniometer to check phase on your primary channel and verify the attack is positive so the bass sound doesn't destruct any instruments in the mix. Next, add the secondary track and phase invert it to see what sounds better.

 

[Jeff Kissell]

...either it sounds OK or it doesn't (as opposed to what the meters or waveforms look like)...

WORD!!