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I’m mixing a hastily set up festival recording of a trio of bass, drums and piano and there was only a very short time to set up the mics so there is a lot of bleed.

The bassist is asking if I can somehow bring out the bass more in the dense textures. The bass was recorded with a Neumann M149 and a DPA clipped to the bridge of the bass.

I’ve never had to deal with this kind of situation before so I’d appreciate any suggestions as to how to approach this. Even hearing someone tell me “you can’t really do anything” would be helpful (the bassist understands he might not get what he’s asking for).

Here are short track clips of a dense section showing what I have to work with:
http://minormodemusic.com/pub/clips/

The bass mics are tracks 03 and 08.

Thanks for any help.

**Leigh

that's tough, there is a lot of bleed.

That said, playing for 5 minutes or so I used a chain of MW Compressor > MW EQ and was able to isolate the bass a bit better and make it more present in the mix. It's a tough call. I think it can be made a bit better with more time. I don't have a time to play with it more right now, but I will have more time later tomorrow and take some screen shots of the settings if you want.

My feeling is that you can get it a bit better (and probably noticeable) but the bleed dictates how dean the final tracks can be.

As a bassist who has faced this many times... There are two ways to manipulate volume but so many think that more is the best way. Often you get better results with less.

A simple trick is to not bring out the bass. Use judicious EQ on the other tracks to shape the low end so that they get out of the way.

Next, light compression is the go-to tool to tighten up the bottom end. It works best with EQ to filter down the wooly frequencies. Less, then compress.

I have also discarded the bass track and built my sound from the bleed into the other mics. I should set up a SoundCloud account, I suppose, as I have a couple of examples where this worked out extremely well - you'd never know that a separate bass track did not exist.

Trust me: I liked every note to be heard when I played.

.

You don't have to own Ozone for this free guide from Izotope to be useful. Look at page 6 first.

http://downloads.izotope.com/guides/iZo ... hOzone.pdf

Steve, I'd really appreciate screen shots if you are willing to do that.

Mike, I hadn't thought about doing much with the other tracks, so thanks for that suggestion.

I'm very lucky in that the bassist has a lot of experience with making recordings and knows what's possible and what's not.

**Leigh

ok - I'll get to that sometime over the next week and grab some screenshots (along with posting a mix of what those screenshots all sound like).

leigh wrote:...I'm very lucky in that the bassist has a lot of experience with making recordings and knows what's possible and what's not.

**Leigh

No doubt, Leigh, but it's pretty cool when you can pull a rabbit out of the hat, so to speak and pull off a sonic miracle -- and never let on to the customer how easy it was.