I arrived in Long Island with my Record-loaded laptop, MBox, budget mic collection, and a few harp and vocal tracks I was feeling pretty good about. Next on the to-do-list was some upright bass. Once again, I had no experience tracking this notoriously uncooperative instrument.

My sister's upright is a German model; I'll have to get back to her about the make and vintage, but it sounds absolutely beautiful in person. Whereas the harp was tracked in an un-carpeted, rectangular room with 18' ceilings, we were going to record the bass in a former bran loft, carpeted with vaulted ceilings and an irregular room shape. I had actually recorded drums in there years earlier, and the room tone is really pleasing: right on the cusp between warm and dark, with an even and relatively short decay. When it's empty, that is. As it was, there was a lot of stuff in the space, and it cluttered the tone a little.

Still, I wanted to see how well that tone would sit in the mix, so I used a combination of mics, one AKG C3000B at about four feet from the bass, pointed at the neck joint, and a Blue Encore 100 cardioid dynamic wrapped in a towel and stuffed in the bass's bridge.

Whaa? Yeah, that's a pretty neat technique I discovered in researching upright micing methods. In one forum I found a live engineer detailing how an elderly jazz player showed up at a gig with an SM57 sandwiched between two pieces of foam, and then seated in the bridge so it was facing up at the space between the fingerboard extension and the neck joint. The poster attested to this method's great results in the studio too, and though I didn't have a 57 with me, I did have the Blue Encore 100. I swaddled it in a hand towel, stuffed it into the bridge, and started tracking. (I took some pictures of this setup, but they were subsequently lost; you'll see a similar arrangement in the picture at the right, save with a Neumann KM184 and rubber bands instead of a towel.)

Right off the bat I was unhappy with the AKG's sound. No matter how I positioned it relative to the instrument or the room, it was either too boomy or too bright. In particular, the mic seemed to exaggerate the annoying high-frequency rosin-friction sound of the bass when bowed. The C3000B is a fantastic mic for acoustic guitar, but its scooped-upper-mid sound wasn't really liking this room. I switched it out for the Samson CO2 pencil condenser, and while the sound wasn't fantastic, it was a lot smoother, and more focused. What I was really impressed with was how good the bridge-wedged Blue Encore 100 sounded. It got just the right amount of attack without sounding harsh, and a really present lower-mid response that I figured I'd get a lot of mileage out of when the mix came together. I positioned the CO2 to complement the sound of the dynamic mic with a little more air and extreme low end. Even though we ended up tracking the performance pizzicato instead of arco, I ended up with two very usable upright tracks from my Long Island visit. Oh, and some pretty nice four part vocal harmonies, tracked again with the M-Audio Luna II.

I should note that, while I've quickly become very comfortable with Record's arrange view, and have damn-near fell in love with its mixer interface, I have yet to make use of the rack feature. I wonder if I even will, what with the faux-SSL console's built-in dynamics and aux effects. One little niggle I've found so far is the lack of 'solo' and 'mute' status parity between the arrange and mixer views in Record (i.e., if you mute a track in arrange view, it will still be muted when you switch to mixer view, but the mixer interface's corresponding channel's mute button will not be illuminated). There were more than a few times when I was listening to playback in mix view and couldn't understand why I couldn't hear a particular track, only to find that I had muted that same track in arrange view. Kinda dumb.

Next it's back to Chicago for some final additions including acoustic guitar and who knows what else.