Topic: Acoustic bass lost in the mix - Help

[ScoobieKW]

Recorded Crush Trio with Skerik on Sunday.

Onstage subcardioid pair + pa (Skerik's sax mic only in PA)

Keplinger is a loud drummer, and PK's bass is buried in the mix.

Here is my first pass of a mix.

http://kennedy-williams.net/mp3/2013-03-03%20Crush%20Trio.mp3

After listening to the above mix, I've been playing with compressing the onstage (mostly bass and drums) as well as using eq to increase 100-300 Hz. So far, haven't liked the results.

Suggestions?

[bombdiggity]

^

Must be very sax heavy (or maybe not the right edit there to get the band mix?).  I'm not at a place I can pay close attention or blast it but I'm really only hearing sax there. 

Acoustic bass is always difficult to get the right balance (acoustic piano maybe worse though...).   

Usually eq will help since there's not usually anything else down there (assuming the placement mitigates room reflections as it should onstage). 

You can usually see where the root of the bass notes are in a frequency analysis, but don't forget the overtones.  I find some attention to the 400 to 800 Hz area helps bass sound.  That higher end starts to mingle with other instruments though... 

Also note that roughly 125 to 400 is sort of a no man's land where the frequencies are not necessarily that pleasing (there's a technical term for that I forget) so it is useful to be careful there. 

I don't know if your approach of compressing the lows would in the end be helpful?

[ScoobieKW]

I'll post a more recent mix later. The live mix was sax heavy. My first attempt was to recreate what I heard live. Unhappy with that, now I'm digging deeper.

The good news is that the sax isn't prominent in the onstage feed.

[F.O.Bean]

I use a MultuiBand Compressor in WL 6 to do small things like add/remove lowend/highend. works very well IMO!

[ScoobieKW]

Updated the file on the server, new version with compression on onstage mics.

[borjam]

It's a long shot, but in these situations, even if unorthodox, giving a try to an M/S conversion and playing with the M (some eq, maybe some upward compression for the low frequencies) can give you a surprise.

Worth a try, anyway

[ScoobieKW]

Ended up with a mix of compression and equalization.

http://bt.etree.org/details.php?id=562727

Enjoy.

[bombdiggity]

Your result seemed fine so that worked...