Jazz Quintet recording

[boxer]

Hi,
I have to record an uncommon jazz quintet (voice, guitar (guitarist is the singer), ac. bass, drums, congas and tenor sax). I have a quite big room, with good sound, but I am not sure where where to place congas and upright bass, to avoid drums bleed.
I have an 8 input w/ 8 pre amps interface, and my mics are:

2 MXL 993
1 MXL 604
1 Bluebird
2 SM 57
2 AT 2021

Any suggestions?
Thank you very much

Daniel

[Remoteness]

Can you tell us more about your room?
IMO, that's the key to deciding where to place the congas and upright bass.

Furthermore, the comfort of the performers should out weight the leakage issues.

You did say the room had a good sound; perhaps you can deal with a little "good" leakage.

In any event, there are ways to making this work for you, we need a bit more information about the room.

If I'm replying too late, how did your session go?

[beingmf]

i just went through all this - avoiding leakage of the drums into the double bass mic IMO is impossible without massive gobos or a dedicated booth. as soon as the drummer starts to hit bass drum or toms a little harder, the drum signal will be louder than the double bass's :(

exception maybe: really unsensitive microphone (but is it worth recording a double bass like that?) or a pretty dead room, and the bass player is really far away (maybe in a bass shy corner of the room?) but then the rhythm section won't play in a way that you'll want to record ) unfortunately i ran out of fig-8 mics during this particular session, so I don't know if recording the bass 90 degrees off axis to the drums e.g. with a ribbon would have worked out better.
if you (or rather: the bassist ) can live with the sound of a mic (in your case maybe a 57) stuck into the bridge (with chunks of foam) and pointing upwards, sometimes this is a live saver.

my solution was to use the (good) bridge pickup via bass amp DI and mix the mic signal in quite low. tweak the DI'd signal until it comes close *cough cough* to the mic'd sound. maybe there's a impulse response somewhere on the internet that one could use? experiment with the polarity of both signals in respect to each other, and both to the rest of the instruments as well.

but even with a DI signal I've had some surprises in the past: since the body of the bass will act as a resonator, you might end up with some almost drum-cancelling low mid mud in the bass track - dependant on the level of the other players of course.

EDIT: forgot the congas - from my experience not so difficult to isolate, again dependant on the dynamics/levels of the other players. i'd put him next to the drummer, in one line.

[beingmf]

hey daniel!
how did it work? please tell us about your findings...
thanks!

[boxer]

Hi, sorry for answering so late. In fact I haven't done this recording yet (the one with congas), I'll do it in a couple of weeks, I'll post an mp3 when I have it. I am not a mixing engineer, I am a musician, but I am learning some stuff about recording, anyway, I think my main problem was that I did too close miking, then EQ the drums themselves and then realize that there was a lot of drums also in the bass track, which changed the sound of my drums. I have read this

Recording: Remastering Three Jazz Classics: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Art Pepper, and Sonny Rollins - Pro Sound Web

about 'Time Out' recording, looking the diagram seems there has to be a lot of bleed in every mic, but I think is part of the jazz natural 'room sound', and if you get it by mic possitioning then you don't have to mess too much with processors, and bleed won't be a problem. What do you think?

[7rojo7]

use the bass pick up into an amp, put it close to the drummer, it's really only good for that
isolate the bass as much as you can (Charlie Haydn did some tours with plexiglass gobos for all of the instruments)
In the studio (even liveyou can put the congas 'behind' the drums (on the HiHat side for sight lines)
the other big problem will be the vocal mic, you'll need isolation for the singer and the bass, so put them together
chunks of foam make the bass sound like ASS
with your formation it would seem like you need to get the dums and congas somewhere safe, the vocal and bass somewhere safer and the sax znd gtr amp out of the way from the others
gobos help a lot but don't do 'magic'
If you have studio monitors, these can help more than cans
in a small space, the delay should be minimal