Recording Double Bass / Mixing & Phase Alignment for Upright Bass
Recording Acoustic Double Bass with Multi-Miking
In today’s #faTutorial, explore our multi-miking technique tailored for acoustic double bass recording, ensuring optimal phase alignment and mix clarity! Acoustic double bass recording techniques often involve the use of multiple microphones for several reasons:
There are many aspects to a large acoustical instrument. You have, for example, the sound of the picking of the player on the fret-board, the bass-rich, vibrant sound of the body and maybe some nice room ambience (depending on your recording studio, of course).
Don’t fix it in the mix – “Blend it” in the mix!
If you use different microphones for all of these aspects you gain total freedom of how they are blend together in the final mix and you can choose and change the sound at any time. That’s why I use 3 different microphones in this setup.Some of the lower frequencies that are dominant for acoustic upright bass need some room to develop. That’s why a certain distance, without too much room ambiance, is essential! Although multi-miking techniques can give you all these benefits, you’ll also have to deal with Phase issues due to the time differences (or better ‘run time differences’) between the mics.
Mic Blending & Phase Alignment go hand in hand
In this tutorial I use our Automatic Phase Alignment Plug-In faGuitarAlign to counter these effects! Of course, you can use every other Phase Alignment Plug-in you want. But faGuitarAlign is the ultimate choice for this task. You’ll notice that I don’t use a lot of effects in this particular mix. The blend of the 3 mics combined with the Phase Alignment gives us an already pretty good sounding acoustic bass.
Mixing the double bass
All I’ve done, aside from the mic blending, is some subtle adjustments in the 4k range, a little bit of multiband compression in the lower mids to get rid of ‘boom-iness’ and a little bit of saturation to add warmth. And that’s basically it.
I’ve also added sidechain compression to make air between the bass and the kick drum. I will go into more detail on how to do that in an upcoming tutorial.I hope you found this tutorial helpful. In case you need some more double bass action: Check out this article from the double bass blog: Recording Double Bass in the studio. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter and leave a comment below.
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