After trying many things the best choice for me is been the DPA4061 with the DPA rubber suspension attachment that put the mic slightly below the bridge. Perfect combination of bass sound and finger articualtion. Arco is also good.

FWIW this is Bruce Swedien's choice for upright, and he is not hard up for mic choices.

If you are recording stereo then put up a pair of your favorites a few feet away and mix to taste.

Rich

Have a few mics that I really like... The UM57 is big and fat giving a lot of body, but not a lot on the top end. The U47FET is another favorite- gives the body but more on the top. At a reasonable budget, the SE3300a has a very similar sound to the 47FET. Bought mine for only a couple hundred bucks- probably one of the best deals I've found in a mic out there.

--Ben

We use to use a Sony ECM90 Lavalier Microphone wrapped with foam rubber and stuck into the f hole for a bass in concert sound situations. Nice full sound no room problems. I just helped a friend do some recording with an stand up bass as part of an acoustic group recording and we had a heck of a time recording the bass. I sounded like everything else except a bass. We finally figured out that the room we were trying to record it in was not large enough for the bass notes to fully expand and resonate. We put the bass in a larger room and it sounded fine. Tricky instrument to record well. I did a classical recording of a 17th century bass in a concert hall at the local college with a pair of 4006s spaced about three feet apart and three feet from the instrument and the bass player said his bass had never sounded so go on a recording. I have also used Neumann M-49s and RCA 77DX with good results.

FWIW

Excellent video on how Bruce records the upright bass /media/vhs-recording-with-bruce-swedien-1997