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:
<span>Unitled New tune from Islwyn1 by solobasssteve</span>