Mike Outram and some jazz funk shredding.

Right now, my favourite guitarist to listen to is Mike Outram. That's not surprising, given that we've just recorded an album together, that's being sporadically mixed as and when we get days free to meet up and do it. (see here for more on that).

But, I've also been listening to his amazing playing with Asaf Sirkis & The Inner Noise (will look for vids/embeddables from them soon), and he just tweeted a link to this video, of him playing with the London Horns at the 606 Club. (Incidentally, I'm playing at the 606 on Sunday night, with John Lester - come down!) 

This tune reminds me of the Brecker Brothers - funky 70s fusion - and Mike's solo is wikkid. 

Gorgeous Ambient Music

Last Saturday night (only 2 days ago? Wow.) I headlining a mini-festival in Antwerp. It was the 'Antwerp Live Looping Festival' - 6 acts, all making use of real-time looping in one way or another... 

It's always tricky with a festival that's not genre-based, but rather tech-based, as it can seem a little disjointed, but the organiser, Sjaak Overgaauw, had gone for an ambient electronica theme (to be fair, a lot of people exploring the more involved end of looping tech tend to gravitate towards ambient electronica, even if the people who are making a splash tend to be singer-sonnwriters (KT Tunstall, Imogen Heap) or jazz musicians (Bill Frisell, John Schofield) ). He put together a really high quality line-up - more about them, with links and vid can be found at http://www.livelooping.be 

Here's his own album, under to name Premonition Factory. It's a REALLY gorgeous 'proper' ambient record (not the faux-ambient spacy-plus-big-choonz stuff that I do) - great sounds, great ideas, fabulously relaxing without being bland or wall-paper-y at all. 

Have a listen, then buy it if you like it lots: 

There are lots of photos from the fest already up. Here are some of me from Flickr:

Good stuff. More links/video soon, I'm sure.

Susan Enan House Concert Tour - get involved!

My lovely friend Susan Enan is an awesome singer/songwriter. Plays guitar and piano, and writes the kind of songs that end up playing at key moments in massive budget HBO series. (Bones, if you're interested). 

Anyway, she's got the house concert bug (wise lady), and is organising a tour. Which you can be a part of. 

Watch, and join in :) 

Lots Of People Like This Video

I'm a bit of a stats-junky. I check my google analytics pretty regularly, and my bandcamp stats, but I rarely look at youtube.

so it was a lovely surprise to check just now and see that this video below has had over 3000 views. 

Given that it was an improv, filmed on my phone, that's a pretty amazing return on investment, in terms of the attention people are paying to my music. 

It's also had lots of very positive ratings. Which is also nice. 

So, enjoy! 

1st Outram/Lawson track - 500 listens gets you track 2!!

You may have already heard this track, if you follow my blog, But here it is again in case you missed it. 

This is the first (very) rough un-mix of a track from my forthcoming duo album with Mike Outram - guitar monkey of some considerable wikkid skillz. 

There are a couple of hours of fab improv music for us to sort through before the album comes out, and if you want to hear more of the rough mixes, we're going to put each track out as the previous one reaches 500 listens on Soundcloud :) 

So, listen, get your friends to listen, embed it in your blog, tweet about it, post the link on forums, and as soon as we hit 500, there'll be another one there. and again. and again. :) 

here it is:

Crazy Love, live, with Andrew Buckton

Here's another track from the South Wales gig. My friend Andrew Buckton came down to the gig with me, as we were recording his new album the day after, and it worked out well for everyone. 

He did a couple of his own songs solo before I played, and gained a whole load of new fans right there and then. So during my set, he got up and sang this with me. I'm v. pleased with the solo on this too. We hadn't rehearsed it at all, so the arrangement is wonderfully loose! 

You might recognise it :) 

more news about his album as it becomes available - that was a whole lot of fun to record! 

Improv Tune No 2 explained/explored

OK, here's a look into track 2 of the improv stuffs from the South Wales gig.

It starts with a sound very familiar to those of you who've been listening to my music for a while - an eBow on the harmonic setting, playing a sound with a huge chorus sweep on it and a long delay + lots of reverb.

I loop a couple of long held notes with that, and then start playing around with the 'quantised replace' function in the Looperlative, which as I've got it set at the moment, replaces 1/98th (I think) of the audio in the loop - or in the case of one of the buttons I was using, 3 alternate 1/98ths of the loop. The other buttons replaces 2 alternate bits and pitch shifts the replaced bits.Hence the weird unfolding bleepy rhythmic stuff that begins to emerge.

In order to pull the bleepy stuff into a more regular rhythm, I used the 'bounce' function, which records whatever's playing on the selected channels along with whatever's being played into the Looperlative, to record the auto-wah part and the bleeps onto a new channel, which cropped the bleep track to the same length as the wah, and gave it a more steady rhythm.

The melody improv started out as a series of descending 6th intervals, which became the tune when it came back round and was looped before the second big EBow line came in (with the regenerating delay on it), along with the original bleep track (which was muted when it bounced to the wah track) - followed by distorted lead line, with a sound that is pitched up an octave, and has a pedal wah on it. The 6th interval theme comes back again...

A little fragment of the lead sound is looped, so I can switch back to the auto-wah sound for the fade out... the chord that sounds like that chord from 'Venus' by Bananarama - that's alternating Bmin and the open harmonics where those notes are, I think... (will check if anyone's particularly interested) - I started playing that little pattern in the intro to the whole gig, and at that moment, thought it might work... :)

So here it is - enjoy:

<span>Untitled new tune Islwyn2  by  solobasssteve</span>

New improv tune number 1 explained...

So, I've just posted two new tunes to Soundcloud. They were recorded at a gig in South Wales last Friday night, and I've blogged about them here already. 

But I thought I'd use this blog to talk a little more about them, so here's some notes on the first tune. 

I'm playing my fretted 6 string bass, which I rarely use on gigs, due to me normally only taking one with me. However, earlier in the week, I was recording music for a new duo album with Mike Outram, and took both basses, and enjoyed it so much, I decided to take two basses to this gig too. 

Clearly it inspired me... The main hook on the tune (and then the basis for the melody later on) is sliding fourths over an open E in the bass - in Eminor, The chord pattern suggested a certain rhythmic groove and thanks to the audience being so amazingly attentive I was able to switch to just playing the groove and exploring that with some percussive stuffs thrown in - you just can't do that kind of thing with a noisy audience. The people listening at the CrossKeys Hotel were proper awesome, and very supportive, so I got to play with way more subtlety than I would've if I'd been background music. 

So the groove gets looped, then the tremolo chords added on top (on a separate track on the Looperlative because they're sync'd in time, but not the same length as the bass groove, and then the melody gets explored with a couple of different sounds. 

The last bit is fun, because I decided to alternate playing over the loops with playing 2 or 4 bars of music with the loops turned down - I didn't stop and retrigger the loops, instead I just used a volume pedal to turn them all down, which meant that I had to gauge the time of the interim pretty well - it because a bit of a game with myself, trying to get the re-entry just right. I get it pretty much there on every time round :) 

Here it is, have a listen, share it around, try your own version if you're a bassist... I'll hopefully get some time to work on the idea for the next solo album: 

Gail Ann Dorsey - Stop On By

Just in case any of y'all mistakenly thought that I invented any of this solo bass stuff, here's the first solo bass performance I ever saw. It's from 1986, on a brilliant UK music show called The Tube. 

Gail Ann Dorsey wasn't the first either, obviously, but this was the first time I'd ever seen anyone playing bass without any other instruments. She sounds incredible. 

She's in the UK next week, playing bass and singing with the sublimely awesome Jonatha Brooke - click here for tour dates. DON'T miss them.