In the middle of an interesting musical challenge. Am currently in the process of transcribing, and learning so I can record, a bass solo piece by someone else, for a UK guitar magazine. Normally, when I learn a piece, I’m asked to inject some of myself into the process – people tend not to ask looping fretless 6 string bassists to play generic parts, funnily enough – but this time, my job is to sound as much like the original as I can. How bizarre does this feel? very bizarre indeed. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult (bit’s of the tune are tricky, but not of it is actually ‘hard’), it’s just that it feels… alien! My tendency is to reinterpret the piece, make it more ‘me’. Not allowed this time.
Anyway, it’s all good discipline. I’ve got a couple of weeks to do it in, which should be fine, even with all my teaching in between, and finishing off the album with theo…
talking of which, Theo came round this morning to make sure the mix/eq on all the tracks was where we wanted it to be. So I reinstalled my fixed harddrive, which is working marvellously (God bless Ted!)
So we tweaked some of the EQ, I added a tube amp simulator to one of the bass tracks, and we listened. And we liked what we heard. And got all animated about how much we’re looking forward to releasing the album. Which should be available for preorder in the next couple of weeks. I’ll be putting another MP3 on the site before too long… maybe later on today. Watch this space.
Soundtrack – last night, top banana radio was back on air – paul’s v. fine show. other than that, Talk Talk, ‘Spirit Of Eden’ (on of the world’s perfect albums) and lots of the track that I’m doing for that guitar mag I mentioned above.