Acoustic Playing Sweet Spots near the Wall

[Mark Mazurek]

Yes, in a nice 'lively' room, it's very easy to place things and hear the differences.

Most studio 'problem rooms' have heavily treated walls and possibly carpet.
This kinda 'masks' the obvious high end spacial 'cues' you hear and drives people NUTS on why their low frequencies seem 'all over the place'.

To complicate the problem more, you find a great spot in a room (where you love your bass sound), but it doesn't sound like that on the recording, and wonder why. It's because you put a mic in front of your bass, not out in the room (or where your ears are).

When 'working' a room (or wall combo) like this, you need to look at the room as part of the instrument. Sound sources never sound good in anechoic chambers (no reflections). Play the room as part of the 'rig'.

This is the foundation of all the frustration with amplification when playing 'out'. Every room has different size, reflection, absorbtion, shape, etc...
It's why 'swiss army knife' amps include phase switches, high pass filters, notch filters, fancy eq, etc...

Sellers of live equipment should have generous return policies, because you rarely can tell an amps true potential/pitfalls in the one room you try it in.

[David Powell]

I really appreciate your insights into all of this, Mark. I have recorded the DB a few times and gotten really nice results with Garage Band, my Macbook and a Tascam USB 122 interface and a couple of cheap condenser mics. In most of the situations there were other acoustic instruments recorded ensemble on just two stereo channels, no isolation or separate tracks. We put the mics just kind of out there in the room to get general mixes of all the instruments and really didn't think to much about what we were doing in any technical way. And I guess we got lucky considering the possible pitfalls you are describing. We did do some multi-track stuff too, but didn't move the mics from where we had already set them. I think we just had all the levels looking good and just left it alone without really thinking about putting it right up close to the bass. Dumb luck completely.

I'm thinking that whenever I go to an acoustic jam session now, I'm going to claim a corner and then work my way out until it sounds loud and balanced. Imagine, all this time I thought I had a great sounding bass and instead I just have a great sounding house.