Media - bass guitar - Page 2

I'm Staying Home This Christmas

As part of our #LPlatePlayers collective, our esteemed leader @[email protected] wanted to write a Christmas song for #RememberingGeordie since he was such a mad fiend for all things Christmas. It was very collaborative, she did the base song with vocals and details of the key and chord changes, and then the rest of us piled in for the various parts and she pieced it all together and mixed it. I offered to do both bass guitar and drums, and am so impressed at how well the song turned out!

I'm definitely getting a feel for the drums at this point, for the song it was pretty much free reign other than wanting to ensure there was an open/close hi-hat at the last beat of the bar, and of my original take there were only a couple of minor improvements that @[email protected] suggested (well, that and a bit of quantisation needed), plus some back and forth figuring out how the intro should go. For the bass guitar, my timing was quite good and there was only very minor quantisation needed. For both instruments, I ended up recording it in sections rather than attempting to go through the whole song in one go, and that made it FAR more manageable.

I'm also going to get the original stems for the song and see if I can turn it into "I'M STAYING HOME THIS CHRISTMAS (DEEP TECHNO MIX)". 😈 (Or at least, some sort of electronic version anyway; we'll see how good my Logic Pro skills are. 😛) I did something similar a couple of years ago and it was great fun.

Posted on 23 November 2024, 14:50

A photo of a white femme-ish non-binary person with dyed black hair and wearing all black clothing, in the middle of playing a bass guitar.

First bass lesson with the seventeen year-old!

our house lily photos.app bass guitar

Posted on 2 November 2024, 17:14

A photo of the box of a Boss ME-90B bass guitar multi-effects pedal. The "pedal" is more of a board, it's very large and a dark blue colour and is absolutely festooned with dials.

Huzzah, the last bit of my order arrived! Very excited to be able to get significantly more interesting bass tones now.

our house darkroom new toys bass guitar

Posted on 23 October 2024, 12:21

A photo of my standing desk in its upright position, with an electric guitar sitting to the left of the desk, a bass guitar sitting to the right of the desk, a MIDI keyboard on the desk, and Logic Pro showing on the main display.

Recording the bass and drums for @[email protected]'s upcoming Christmas song has gotten me into the mood to try record a short little something of my own. 👀

I'm trying to do some kind of cool minor pentatonic thing, we'll see how it actually comes out. 😅 I've got the bass riff recorded so far and it's sounding pretty good, next stop is some lead guitar over the top of it. (The MIDI keyboard may or may not end up being made use of in the final product.)

our house music darkroom guitar bass guitar midi keyboard

Posted on 15 September 2024, 21:12

A photo of the corner of a room that has a whole bunch of musical equipment in it: there are three electric guitars and a bass guitar sitting in a stand at the left, two very large speakers, an electronic drum kit, a MIDI keyboard, and a full size piano at the right that is painted in extremely garish bright colours.

A photo of five smiling people looking at the camera. There's me, a man with short brown hair and a short red beard holding a bass guitar, a tall man with shoulder-length hair sitting down holding an electric guitar, two men sitting at the drum kit each holding one drum stick each, and a woman with long brown hair holding a bright pink ukulele.

The reason I was in the office today was because it turns out we have a whole set of musical instruments in the "wellness room", so a bunch of us decided to get together to play some music!

It was SO FUN! Only two of us could play guitar or bass so I mostly stuck to one of those, and we ended up with two people playing drums together (one person would do the hi-hat and the other would do the kick drum because nobody was coordinated enough to do both together, lol) and we absolutely got into a groove and were rocking out and it was so excellent. It's planned to be a regular thing and I'm so looking forward to the next one.

(There is a group of Very Talented people who get together and play most Wednesdays and Fridays but that was way too intimidating for us so we did our own little thing.)

selfie me work darkroom friends guitar drums bass guitar in the office jamming

Posted on 15 August 2024, 20:35

A screenshot of my current desktop setup, with the music notation for Bad Moon Rising on the left, and Logic Pro showing separate tracks for the parts of Bad Moon Rising plus another for my actual bass guitar on the right.

Okay THIS is cool as hell: one of the features Apple added with the latest Logic Pro update is the ability to split an audio file into its constituent parts (vocals, drums, bass, and "other"), and the guy who did my bass guitar course actually wrote out a bunch of bass lines for a selection of 50 songs of various genres, and one of the ones included is Credence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". That song is actually in my iTunes library so I dropped it into Logic Pro, had it analyse the tempo so the metronome would match, then ran it through the splitter and muted the bass track. So now I'm actually playing my bass along for reals to the song! 🤘🏻

(The keen-eyed among you may note that the tempo according to Logic Pro is actually twice what it should be, I think the 8th-note hi-hats throw the calculations off but it doesn't really matter.)

screenshot logic pro bass guitar

Posted on 12 June 2024, 21:12

Metal Tones in A Minor Pentatonic

I made another short little song! This one is 100% me playing all the instruments (guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboard) rather than doing it via loops, and I'm very pleased to report that I didn't need to quantise the drums at all, I smashed the timing (the same can't be said for the guitar and bass guitar, they both need a little bit of nudging, though I didn't realise they needed it until I had recorded the drums).

The guitar was a bit frustrating to get right, I had most of it but the little "solo"-esque bit in the middle required quite a few takes. I also subsequently realised that if you have the loop mode on and are recording something, it'll just keep looping over and recording the whole looped section as a different take, so I did that for the drums and ended up recording it like nine or ten times through then listened to them back and picked the best. The guitar and bass sounds come from Two Notes' "Genome" software, I had quite a bit of fun dialing in the sound, and I used my Epiphone SG Standard rather than the JIVA for a bit of change.

guitar drums audio epiphone sg standard bass guitar midi keyboard two notes genome

Posted on 5 May 2024, 15:05

Beepy Doof

And the finished product! (Full disclosure, this was done by way of Logic Pro's Live Loops and recording the performances as I switched scenes. The only instrument I'm actually playing here is the bass guitar, I used the keyboard to noodle around with initially and get a melody but put it into Logic Pro's step sequencer once I'd figured it out, and while I did a lot of tweaking to the drums to get them sounding how I wanted, they're ultimately the "Drummer" track.)

Even with the caveats above, I'm super-happy with this one. As I was listening to it and fiddling, I realised I needed a "simple" and "complex" version of the melody so there was a bit more variation during the song, and I'm ALWAYS a sucker for a song with good build-up.

music audio bass guitar

Posted on 3 March 2024, 11:50

A photo of my standing desk in its upright position, with a bass guitar sitting to the left of the desk, a MIDI keyboard on the desk, and Logic Pro showing on the main display.

Yisssss.

our house music darkroom bass guitar

Posted on 2 March 2024, 19:39

Noodling in A Major

Both my guitar AND bass guitar course have simultaneously gotten into learning about chords and songs "in the key of" and it'd been a while since I'd tried to record anything, so I did some noodling! Pretty happy with it, I used my bass amp plugged into the audio interface along with Two Notes' "Wall of Sound" plugin, and for the guitar I plugged straight into the audio interface and gave Two Notes' new "Genome" plugin a bit of a go. Clean for the rhythm guitar and an edge-of-breakup one for the lead.

(My timing is definitely getting better, but I still used Logic Pro's quantisation function to pull everything FULLY into time instead of constantly recording it over and over until I got it right. 😛)

music guitar drums audio torpedo wall of sound bass guitar ibanez jiva10

Posted on 11 February 2024, 18:58