Bass is Base

I got a bass guitar for Christmas last year.

I’m loving it.

I’ve been practicing and trying to learn the fundamentals, and I’m having a lot of fun, even if I am clearly not a prodigy or in any way “gifted” with a talent of magic fingers.

It’s all good, I’m just having fun.

Irony

I thought a positive side of that is that I don’t have to deal with accusations of my recordings being created by AI. I give you the full human experience of imperfection on display.

Turns out I was wrong on that.

Screenshot of a Reddit comment: u/SophieChesterfield replied to your post in r/originalmusic "Are you sure? It seems like an AI song that got played through speakers and recorded back to try adn give it mass, lost quality. I doubt any platforms like Deezer or Spotify would label it human — Fuck this ignorant bitch and all the other insecure trolls.

I guess a troll’s gotta troll…

Anyway, moving right along.

So here we are, at just over six months later, and I present an exercise in writing and recording a song.

For the Record

I also recognized that I could create a record of my growth over time, and that doing so would be of benefit in several ways.

I just had to swallow my pride and put it out there.

I chose Soundcloud as the place I would “put it out there”, mostly because I had already created an account there a long time ago, and uploaded a couple of files.

Path of least resistance, for the win.

A Wrong Bassline

So this all started with one of the first basslines I tried to learn.

I didn’t get it quite right.

I admit that freely, and I will verify the song if anyone figures out what it is supposed to be from.

I got the notes mostly right, but I completely ignored the written tempo and played it at MY TEMPO!

But I stuck with it, and I like it.

Vocals

Barely.

Spoken word, more like it.

I guess the kids might call it rap.

I call it a mic-check exercise.

File it under “Funk”.

Trying to sing/speak at the same tempo of the bassline, I realize why it(the bass line) is so much slower in the original song I failed to copy accurately.

So the ultimate focus for vocals was to not mumble, keep a consistent level, and stay reasonably on beat.

If I was going to keep working on this, I would experiment with the lyrical rhythm.

Production

Minimal, some compression and reverb. The lead guitar has distortion and wah-pedal. Pretty basic stuff.

I used Reason 12 to record everything.

Oh yeah, I’ve also had to learn how to do a lot of things in Reason. Still learning that, actually, so this is a history of my progress with producing music as well.

I’ve been uploading artifacts of the experience to Soundcloud (see below).

You can hear a lot of variety between the different songs, even though it is the same basic beat and bass line.

Things have come a long way in the music production realm, and the world is a better place.

Ultimately, it’s been lots of fun so far.