I Seem To Have This Problem…

I Seem to Have This Problem.

If you’ve been following along here these last few months, you may have caught wind of my latest grand scheme. If not… well, I’ll just spill the beans here: I’m working on a “solo bass” album. I say that carefully, with quotation marks, for several reasons… mainly the mixed emotions I have around the cliche of a “solo bass album”, expectations from the “solo bass community”, and everything else that comes with all that. Mixed emotions notwithstanding, this project is just me, my bass cello, and a few electronic gadgets… so there, technically, its a solo bass CELLO album.

Now back to the problem at hand. For the last several months I’ve been practicing, playing, improvising, looping, recording… washing, rinsing, and repeating. My hard drive is filling up with all sorts of auditory material. (Not even mentioning all the “non-bass-driven” projects that seem to momentarily distract me) A few weeks ago I took a couples steps back to take stock of what I had accumulated, took copious notes, made several selections, and generally put a plan together to polish off all this raw material.

Great plan, except that I can’t seem to stop creating MORE material. Every time I sit down and try to focus on developing an existing piece something entirely new falls out right then and then. Which, of course, I then have to record… thus starting the whole process all over again.

Case in point… today’s download. A spookly little dub-inspired piece (another untitled… don’t worry, I’m collecting titles now, though… and will assign them shortly!)

08_30_08_mix2 (7.7MB download)

Technical Notes:
How am I recording these, you might ask? Well… I’m very glad you did. The current setup is as follows. My NS Design Bass Cello is plugged directly into a MOTU Ultralite mk3, which sends the signal to a Boss GT-Pro multi-effect unit. This is where I process the heck out of my bass… in this case, some reverbs, delays, distortion, filters, and such. The signal from the GT-Pro goes back into the Ultralite, which sends it to the Looperlative LP-1. The LP-1 is the device that lets me loop and overdub all the various layers in a real-time fashion. In this case there are about six or seven separate passes: low bowing, ambient distortion, low filtery dubby bass, more ambient noise, some more upper-register bowing, and some more filtery lines. Once I think I have enough going on the LP-1, I dump each loop into the computer one by one (using MOTU’s Digital Performer). Once I have all my tracks laid out, I’m free to edit and arrange (with an ear towards being able to reproduce the piece live, of course). I’m able to adjust the relative levels and eq of each track making sure they play nicely together (or trying, anyway). Once properly adjusted, I add a bit of limiting and leveling to optimize the overall volume of the mix… and export an MP3. And thats it.

1. You’re right about the whole ‘solo bass’ albatross - the value in it for me is as a set of creative limitations, not the fetishisation of an instrument… it’s easy to get pigeon-holed as a muso-nerd if you get dragged too far in that direction…

   As it is, I love what you’re coming up with - today’s offering sounds fab, and I’m looking forward to the album

   Have you used the ethernet export for loops from the Looperlative yet? I couldn’t get it to work last time I tried, but my router is in a different room and I had IP number troubles…

   Posted by Steve Lawson  on  09/02  at  09:26 AM

2. Thanks Steve! That’s exactly how I’m approaching it… limiting myself (on this project, anyway) to just bass… easier said than done, though!

   I couldn’t get the network function on the LP-1 working either… It was easier for me just to “manually” record each loop… plus I’m recording everything at 96/24 and I’d have to up-convert the LP-1 native files anyway.  Thanks again!

   Posted by gustaf  on  09/02  at  01:07 PM