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Vintage threads from the first ten years

mic placement on bass

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4/23/1999 9:31 AM
guitarslim	mic placement on bass Do y'all close mic a bass (single 15" speaker) the same way you'd do a guitar speaker, or what? I"m not getting a very rich texture on tape. Suggestions? Slim

4/23/1999 10:33 AM
GFR	Try mixing three sources: close mic, ambient mic and direct out. Take care with phase cancellations.

4/25/1999 10:28 AM
Pinout 9CV	along with the above, an AKG112 or a beta series mic for close...any decent condensor for ambient (cad akg etc} walk around till you hear where the amp sounds good..leakage from other instruments..keep an ear on that..warm up your DI with a tube pre...

4/26/1999 9:32 AM

:-)

A 15" speaker is a REAL beast to get onto tape well...and for that matter it's hard to get onto tape at all! (ha, ha)

They work great live for the extra lowend "thump" factor but often they produce some really "unusable" lowend that usually clutters the definition of the tone.

I would try a DI and then start with the mic (a dynamic) placed "dead-center" on the cone. If it's too bright or dynamic, make SMALL movements to the outside of the speaker until you find the "sweet-spot."

What kind of cabinet, bass, speaker, board, and mics are you using? Are you using digital or analog?

Trace

4/26/1999 9:35 AM
GFR	I've read about using a small speaker as a mic to record bass amps. The large "diafragm" (the speaker cone) would help picking the low end.

4/29/1999 11:39 AM
guitarslim	GREAT tip GFR! I use acoustic cones or chambers on occasion, but placing a mic in a speaker cone is something I haven't tried yet. DO you think a bad (but not torn, maybe loose) cone would do the job, or maybe one needs that drum-head like response of a (otherwise valuable) cone might be required to snag those fat, solid low end bumps. SLIM

5/7/1999 12:32 AM

As GFR said, using a mix of DI, close mic, ambient, and the old 'speaker as a microphone' trick are all good. also using different combinations of speakers. I really like 10's for the tone and 15's for the boom. On a few projects of late I've been using 5 or 6 different inputs for bass. usually a DI that gets split: one dry and one through a dist pedal. (RAT's Big Muffs and TS-9s have all worked nice). On a 2-10 cab I'll put a large diaphragm condeser and a large diaphagm dynamic. Then I'll use a 15" speaker to mic another 15" speaker. If you do this be sure to use pads and/or imp xfrms to get the levels right.

Then I take all these and submix them to one or two tracks, depending on what kind of space I have. I like to keep the DI distortion on its own track and add it in as I'm mixing to give it just a bit more bite.

With this setup, each mic has its own accented freq, and i just mix in more of whatever I need.

As far as eq goes, the best of course is none, but i always find that boosting a bit of 2k-4k can get the bass to articulate well, and cutting a bit around 300hz-500hz can trim up the flab.

This may be over kill on a four track. Going direct with a good tube compressor may be your best bet as signal to noise will be good and the tone should be nice and punchy. I had a 424 for a while and i always just plugged straight in.

Whatever works,

Warren

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