Bass DI vs mic, what am I missing

@sam.varney · 2026-05-19T08:28:59.85+00:00

Recorded direct for ten years. Jazz Bass into a Countryman Type 85 into a clean preamp into the interface. Sounds great, prints clean, mixes itself. Last month I started miking the Sunn Beta cab on tracking dates because the engineer asked. SM7B on the speaker, blended 60/40 with the DI. The DI side is what I always loved, the mic side adds something I can't name. Warmth maybe. Slap maybe. Something. It's not on the DI. My question is what I'm missing about why this is. The Sunn Beta is a clean solid-state amp, it's not adding tubes. The cabinet is a 1x15, sure, but a clean amp into a clean speaker shouldn't be adding mystery harmonics. And yet there it is. Is the cabinet doing something I should be replicating in post on the DI side instead? IR? Or am I going to just accept that miking adds something real and start doing it more often? I print direct usually because it's simpler. Maybe simpler is wrong. The bass is louder when you play less of it. Maybe also when you mic less of it. Not sure.

KT
@kobu.tinker7 weeks ago
The Sunn Beta is solid-state but the SPEAKER is a transducer with nonlinearities. A 15" cone moving big air picks up cabinet resonances, room reflections at low end, and the speaker's own breakup at the top end of its range. The SM7B catches all of that. The DI catches none of it. That's the gap. For IR, look at OwnHammer or York Audio bass cab IRs from a 15". You'll get 70% of the way there in the box. The other 30% is the room and you can't IR that.
LF
@lo.flannery7 weeks ago
Always mic. Always DI. Always print both. Disk is cheap, takes aren't. The day you regret only having a DI is the day you needed the mic and couldn't go back. I've never regretted printing both.

Bass DI vs mic, what am I missing

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