Double Bass Informative amateur recording

[Bruce Calin]

I'm not sure this is the proper forum. but I recently heard a recording a student's parent made of a local student orchestra concert. The four student bassists are all students of mine and sounded great(if I do say so myself). The two things I took away from this are that phone recordings can be remarkably good quality, and that the effect of basses playing in a large hall can be very different from what we hear playing on stage. I know we know this, but to hear it from the other perspective is very useful. The various string sections were pretty balanced in terms of number of players, but the bass section sounded huge by comparison. If this had been a commercial recording I would think the basses were almost too much. The whole thing was very revealing and I will keep it in mind the next time I'm on stage myself.

 

[AGCurry]

I'm not sure this is the proper forum. but I recently heard a recording a student's parent made of a local student orchestra concert. The four student bassists are all students of mine and sounded great(if I do say so myself). The two things I took away from this are that phone recordings can be remarkably good quality, and that the effect of basses playing in a large hall can be very different from what we hear playing on stage. I know we know this, but to hear it from the other perspective is very useful. The various string sections were pretty balanced in terms of number of players, but the bass section sounded huge by comparison. If this had been a commercial recording I would think the basses were almost too much. The whole thing was very revealing and I will keep it in mind the next time I'm on stage myself.

Yes. Last year I took my brother-in-law, also a bassist, to an orchestra rehearsal. I was using my gut-strung bass, which is not loud, and there was only one other bassist. While I wasn't hearing my bass well, brother-in-law said my sound was clear and powerful.

 

[Don Hergert]

Regarding phone recordings, the important thing to remember is that such recordings may be high quality, but they will sound terrible coming out of the phone's speaker -- such tiny speakers are awful and cannot sufficiently reproduce tones in the bass range. Moving such high quality recordings to a device that can do justice to the full range of recording quality is imperative.

Also, just like everything else related to a double bass performance, venue acoustics have a huge amount to do with how high quality recordings sound.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

I'm not sure this is the proper forum. but I recently heard a recording a student's parent made of a local student orchestra concert. The four student bassists are all students of mine and sounded great(if I do say so myself). The two things I took away from this are that phone recordings can be remarkably good quality, and that the effect of basses playing in a large hall can be very different from what we hear playing on stage. I know we know this, but to hear it from the other perspective is very useful. The various string sections were pretty balanced in terms of number of players, but the bass section sounded huge by comparison. If this had been a commercial recording I would think the basses were almost too much. The whole thing was very revealing and I will keep it in mind the next time I'm on stage myself.

I’ve been recording my performances for over 15 years. It is indeed informative. Reviewing these recordings has helped me improve my playing significantly.

What these recordings also shows, and this is to your point, what you hear on stage is not often like what is heard in the house.