8 piece classical guitar orchestra with electric bass. No headphones, so a bass amp was set as low as possible in the room, which was the way the piece was played on a tour. There are a LOT of ways an electric bass can sound, from clean to aggressive, and there was no particular note about it. Some sections of the piece are fairly aggressive.

Problem - the composer/producer did not attend, and was bothered by the sound of a bass string buzz that sounded somewhat like a snare rattle in the full mix in one sparse section that starts with bass followed by guitars creeping in, some playing just harmonics. None of the other 12 people in attendance noticed it or were bothered by it while getting sounds and auditioning takes.

8 individual guitar mics
Bass DI and mic on amp
Ambisonic mic in the center of the guitar semicircle, same plane as the 8 individual mics.
AB omni overhead pair
Blumlein ribbon overhead pair

The bass sources lacked the sound, the overhead pairs lacked the sound, and it could be found in the ambisonic if set to a maximizing position. The ambisonic (at least as I was using it) was set to point up at the ceiling for maximum room ambience, minimum direct sound. No rattle in it.

The 8 guitar mics have a lot of the offending sound. Same horizontal plane as the bassist who was behind the semicircle, so guitar mics secondarily pointing somewhat in the direction of the bass. It was the acoustic sound of round wound strings slapping the neck and frets while played aggressively. The amp was behind the conductor facing the guitarists, as a side note.

I suppose if I'd put a mic on the bass as if it was another acoustic instrument it would allow a shot at using something like RX11 to remove the slap from the guitar mics. That's a first for me, as a thought. That theoretical preemptive fix makes sense - in retrospect! The amp or DI signal is only really useful for reducing the low end bloom in the room. A small gobo blocking the acoustic bass slap from the room would have been useful too; alas there was not one available and no sense that one was needed.

Anyway......FWIW as a one-off story, a situation I'll probably never encounter again.

Tell the composer/producer to go listen to the sound of a real acoustic bass played in the style he dictated in his score. Strings slapped against the fingerboard DO make a snare-like snapping/buzzing sound…which is exactly what was recorded. It’s possible the composer specified the use of an amp to encourage soft, gentle playing (and avoidance of string snapping) ?

If his score contains no instructions for the player to avoid this (natural) artifact, then it’s a predictable outcome of the jazz-like playing style. It’s also just as likely that most listeners will find the sound appealing rather than objectionable.

A caution to the composer for future works would be to listen to his scores played by real musicians, rather than the sample libraries attached to his Sibelius scoring software…or simply to write more specific player notes next time…and be sure to attend the recording session !

If everyone is shattered by this expose of both ‘realistic literal bass-playing’ and/or careless composer technique…it’s likely that Izotope Rx noise removal could diminish or mute the offending string snaps.

Fixing it at source (ie during composition stage) is by far the better solution….

This kind of overplaying usually happens, when the amp is to quiet. Bad monitor leads to bad playing decisions. The player should have had his amp directly next to him.

And... resolved to never do something so foolish again?

Should I bring up the lack of preparation, time, and budget? Classic “miracle it got done at all” constraints.

Really off topic and incorrect, the bass was the only instrument playing in the section, and the technique and sound bothered no one but the absent composer/producer. See the problem?

You wrote, they were on tour with the piece before. Same ensemble, same bass player? The composer never attended a rehearsal or the premiere or any date related to the recording of the piece?
That would be really stupid and hard to believe.

If the bass was the only instrument playing in the section of the piece, it shouldn't be a huge problem to fix, since your mixing or processing choices won't affect the sound of the guitars, right?

Still, a lot of noise problems when playing bass can be easily fixed with better monitoring for the bassist. I would never play with my amp several meters in front of me turned down as low as possible. The problem with a setting like this is often, that it kind of sounds ok in the room, because nobody is really hearing the problem because of masking, but when listening back, the problems become obvious very soon.
Might not be your problem. Might be totally off topic. Still not a wrong observation in general.

Same conductor and maybe some of the same ensemble on the tour, composer was on the tour. Many new players in the session, extremely limited rehearsals....no composer present. The bassist played less aggressively in loud sections, so it seems clear he thought aggressive was the direction for the particular section.

As I said, the offending noise only exists in the air....in 8 of the microphones, all of which start creeping in with harmonics and other soft playing until all are in. You can't move any element without obviously affecting the entire ambience. There is no bit of the sound to be sampled for forensics extraction since it's not in the bass sources.....I'm repeating myself.....

We're taking about 30 seconds at the intro of a 10 minute piece that has no other similar problems.

That's awesome that you never would, but they did! In the past! Too little, too late, extremely minimal time resources for the session....they want it perfect they attend the session with better rehearsed musicians, they have charts that reflect the ambience, levels, and panning they want, blah blah blah, all obvious, even at the time. Instead miracles are expected out of a session without the planning required to give the latitude desired. Not looking for a fix at this point, just sharing a story.

Another ‘retrospective/wise after the event’ solution could have been to substitute electric fret-less bass (eg Fender Jazz) or acoustic double bass plus amp …but that’s a different kind of sound altogether. The main issue seems to have been the brief passage of string snap against fingerboard being picked up by spot mics nearby…and/or slightly over-enthusiastic playing….plus lack of scoring/composer oversight and specificity

what mics/patterns did you use on the guitars and what was the distance/spacing between them?

All SDC cardioids, over the top of the music stands, so maybe 20in (50cm) out. Limited room size so semi-circle was fairly tight. I might guess guitarists on 4-5 foot (123-153cm) centers.

Much about the process was not how one would want to do it.

reason i was asking about the spacing between mics stems from decades of system designing: it may not seem relevant and hence isn't much known amongst recordists but if you dig into the literature of subwoofer array spacing and the resulting patterns, this could be an explanation on excessive bass build-up or some other strange artefacts - if the former is the case, using apfs (besides hpfs) could be (part of) the solution...

Excessive bass buildup isn't a problem to manage.

The spacing does come very close to breaking the 3:1 rule.

Another mic pointed at the fretboard of the electric bass would have captured something that could have ben aligned with the 8 guitar mics and used to remove it from them substantially. Generally no one thinks you would mic an electric bass in that way; only if there was some indication on playback that there was an offending sonic to be managed, and 12 people had no such indication. That's the point of my story.

apf's are about both time and frequency-dependent phase alignment...

...which is one of the reasons why i give nothing about the 3:1 rule and i disagree on the notion that no one would mic a bass that way but then, the issues are hard to assess without hearing not only the result but also the individual tracks.