Muse - Undisclosed Desires

sm57 saves the day!

I'd heard great things about wrapping a Dynamic microphone in some sort of cloth and pushing it down behind the bridge/tail of an upright bass. I didn't know anything else about it, but at a recent location recording faced with my first upright bass, and no really capable condensers, I thought I would give it a bash. I was as sceptical as everyone else at the recording, and wrapped up my kick drum mic in a shirt to an array of pulled faces. Unfortunately, it was just too fat to squeeze in there, and the DI on the upright bass was dodgy at best with a pretty weedy tone, so I tried it with a 57 and it sounded average in the cans, but did pick up a surprising amount of bass for the size of the mic.

The true gold came out when I got home, and realized the 57 behind the bridge had worked a treat (at least enough for me). The low end is very solid, and it also captures great what I'd call "wood frequencies", which really distinguish the tone. Add a touch of RBass which makes some great sounding sub-bass and the end result was brilliant. (If only i could have got a larger diaphragm down there, could well have scrapped the RBass) The only downside was a lack of really high frequencies, which would have been better for solo passages perhaps. The line up was just the upright bass and acoustic guitar/vocals which let me keep the bass's character a lot more than in other line ups perhaps. It was a small house concert with a great vibe and I hope you can pick up on that from how the 57 performed on the night. Recordings here: