mic to grill cloth distance

What is the rationale for choosing a mic-to-grill cloth distance when recording tones with very long wave lengths? I'm home-bound for a while and have decided to layer double bass tracks onto bass-less tunes that friends have sent me (Digimax, MOTU 828, SONAR 4 P). After some experimentation with G-K line outs and DI out and micing my bass, I get the best sound when I mic the G-K directly. Since I am playing in my rec room I need to get pretty close to the G-K to avoid resonances in the room. In an ideal situation, what would one choose for the best distance? I'm using aSennheiser e835. Thanks.

ORIGINAL: Bob Abrams

What is the rationale for choosing a mic-to-grill cloth distance when recording tones with very long wave lengths?

Short or long wavelengths by themselves don't dictate where you have to place the microphone when mic'ing a cabinet. Especially for bass guitar, you want to eliminate a lot of the room sound. If you are biamping the bass with a 15 and 4 10"s, then you probably want to move the mic back far enough to pick up both sounds. Even better is to mic each cabiinet separately.

ORIGINAL: nprime

In the end, it's what sounds good.

Word. There is no official rule. It depends on the sound coming out of the amp and what you want to capture.

It is correct to think that bass amps are usually miked further away than guitar amps are, but that doesn't mean that that's the right approach for any particular situation.

Some things that have worked for me:

A boundary mic on the floor a foot or two in front of the bass amp, which is also on the floor. A regular side-capture mic placed 1/4" off the floor with the capsule pointed towards the bass cone works just as good. This is good in bad rooms, because you are getting very little reflected sound, since the mic is in the exact spot where the sound is getting reflected. It does a pretty good job of capturing the way the bass actually sounds to listeners in the room. Pretty good generic approach to bass. Whether the floor is hard or carpeted makes a big difference and is worth experimenting with. A neat alternative can be to angle a plywood plank in front of the bass cab and use that as your "boundary." Just rest it on a chair at like a 45 degree angle or whatever and get the mic as close as possible to the "boundary." Experiment with mic and boundary distances and angles.

Put the amp off the floor near the center of the room on chairs or a table and put the mic a a foot or two in front of it. This gives a good "full" sound and often works well in conjunction with a phase-corrected DI sound. keeping everything in the middle of the space smooths out some of the resonance problems. Good for old-school "big bottom" sounds.

A mic right in the grill cloth gives a very stringy, present, guitar-like sound that can be effective for distorted, compressed, or aggressive bass sounds that are supposed to be "in your face" but for which a DI signal sounds too clean or wimpy. Good for burpy slap-style bass or picky punk-style "riff" basslines that need to compete with the guitars.

The thing with all of these is that a difference in placement of a couple inches can be huge. The best way to experiment is to have one person playing the bass, another person in the control room listening to the sound from the monitors, and a third person in the room moving the mic around at the instruction of the control room engineer. A relatively experienced engineer can get a great sound in about 20 minutes this way.

Obviously, this requires three people, two rooms, and a talkback system. If you don't have all that, then you'll either need to settle for second-best, or you'll need to put more time and ingenuity into the job.

If you can get a helper to move the mic while you play and listen on headphones with good isolation, or while you play from the next room and communicate via walkie-talkie, you can get pretty close. Or you can do a whole lot of recording takes announcing things like "mic 18 inches in front of cab, 30 degrees off-axis, mic and cab 30 inches off floor," into the mic before each pass and then evaluate them later. Another thing you could do is to record a loop of the bassline direct and then play it back over and over, and then send the recording out to the bass cab while you walk around the room with a mic and a pair of headphones with good isolation and find the best spot. You can either use this "reamped" sound as your take, or you could note the best location and re-record the bassline through the amp.

Bear in mind that this is a big part of the reason that many home recordists, and even many big studios just go direct. Have fun and good luck either way.

Cheers.

Thanks, Yep. Your very instructive message and my last one above crossed in transit. It is very gratifying to have someone take time to explain things in detail, and I appreciate it very much.

ORIGINAL: yep

ORIGINAL: nprime

In the end, it's what sounds good.

Word. There is no official rule. It depends on the sound coming out of the amp and what you want to capture.

It is correct to think that bass amps are usually miked further away than guitar amps are, but that doesn't mean that that's the right approach for any particular situation.

I have a farly large live room (17 x 30 x 11), yet I still find that a DI works really well with my Fender. Well, it's a SansAmp Bass DI, so it has a bit more control than a passive DI. However, years ago we used to build tunnels in front of the bass amp with chairs, mic stands, what ever would hold up packing quilts to give some isolation against room resonances. This might work in your overdub situation, but really does nothing in a full band situation. My mentor suggested putting one mic on the grill, to pick up the sharp attack, and another at least 10 feet away to pick up the truer low end. He warned against phasing problems caused by placing mics a half wave apart (10 ft being about a half wave of 50 Hz, roughly low G).

I am a bit jealous, Bob. Not only do you have the time to experiment, but you have a double bass. I had to sell mine about 20 years ago to make rent.

Hey something I picked up recently that has since served me well in some situations:

I had a client in not too long ago with one of those little cheezy 15 watt Marshall amps. He insisted on placing an SM57 about 2 inches back from the amp and pointing at the cabinet just outside the perimeter of the speaker. When I first saw that I thought the mic had gotten knocked out of position and tried moving it towards the speaker but he stopped me and insisted his way was better. I shrugged it off and decided to humor him.

Sure enough - it sounded great. Nice and warm. So try that. Don't aim it at the speaker - aim it at the cabinet or somewhere else. Interesting mic technique.

This was a solid state Marshall. But it still sounded nice. Even better than my 100 Watt Valvestate.

Sorry to go off topic - I tried out a 20 watt tube Hughes & Kettner a few days ago. Also nice. But I thought it had better clean tones than distorted tones (although they were ok). It really came to life when I dialed back the distortion and switched to the neck pickup on my Les Paul. You could really hear that glassy warm "woman" tone. Sweet.