Thanks @terb! So so much appreciate the input!! It was truly a FUN song to play a cover to!! Great idea on the foam… This is something that I’ve tried to experiment with in the past by inserting foam ‘peanuts’ (even used an old sock) under the strings just behind the nut. Worked pretty good for some of the old country (Johnny Cash) double bass stuff but I didn’t think of using it with my Ibanez with round wounds… It’s a great idea!! I’m gonna have to try that with my next Jamerson Motown song to see what tones and sounds I can get - I would prefer using my Ibanez with the round wounds anyway, but just couldn’t get away from the damn ‘scratch’ I get when I was moving all around the fretboard (certainly much easier and less noticeable on my Telecaster)…
Yea, I read that too and I tried my best to keep with that style, but after numerous (and I mean numerous) practice takes, the pad on my index finger felt as if it were ran up and down a gahdamn gourmet box style cheese grater!! I guess that’s just one of those things that made Jamerson the KING… His true style (and obvious leather finger pads) are something that is very difficult to emulate. Maybe in time??..
I’m a little questionable on this one for where I’m at right now with my playing style… Open notes (at times) for me are very hard to control when it comes to proper muting. Some songs I will play both open and fretted depending on when I pluck the note and what note follows it… What I mean is that if I cannot get a good clean sound out of an open note that is followed by a fretted note that is close to… say… a fifth fret note, I’ll use the fifth fret note in order to control the sustain before moving to my next note I play. This became totally evident to me when I was playing the cover to “We Gotta Get Outta This Place” where I found that using both a fifth fret “D” note and an open “G” worked best for me when it came to note control. Again, Jamerson was the KING and could do way more with his style than I could ever dream of in my lifetime…
Again, REALLY appreciate the feedback! This is the stuff that helps us all get better!!
yeah I understand the thing with the muting and open strings. I like using open strings but I agree, sometimes it’s not very manageable and a good’ol 5th fret fingering works better. well all those stuff are just ideas in the motown bass style, obviously everyone has to find what works for him and the music he plays, there’s no rule really.
about the foam, I used a sock too to mute strings in the past, but here I was talking about putting a foam block under the strings near the bridge (and not the nut) to lower the sustain. what’s interesting is that it gives a more percussive attack, yet very dark and deep. I used this trick on my cover of Axe by the Steel Woods (the dark country song where I played outdoor with a straw hat). Also what’s interresting is that old basses often had factory-mounted foam pads, the Precision and Jazz Bass had these, and the Ricken 4001 had equivalent muting things. it was not a tweak or a hack at the time, it was more a standard thing on early electric basses ! and so it’s a part of this vintage era bass sound. what’s cool is that it costs nothing and it is easy to remove in seconds. the foam pad I use is a part of an old chair seat : $0 tonal option
Cool @terb!! I’ve gotta try this trick!! And I do vividly remember the straw hat outdoor cover that you did last year!! I’ll have to try one outside this spring when the weather gets a little more stable (and warmer)…
You could also probably get the 304 to sound more vintage by using one of the presets that boosts mids and roll the treble off a bit. “Finger” or “Solo” and turn the treble down a little more?
Great suggestion @howard… I’ll have to give that one a try… I do tend to play all of my instruments ‘flat’ and work a little more at perfecting my finger style and playing technique in order to accentuate the sounds and tones that I look for… (from my acoustic/classical guitar playing past I guess)… I’m thinking that the half rounds on the 304 may have proven to be a little to ‘smooth’, and if I can work at getting the slight string ‘scratch’ that I get with the Ibanez 500 with round-wounds under control (more practice, much more practice), I “might” be able to better replicate that Jamerson sound that I’m after???.. Who knows, but this is how we all learn…
Very well played, @Lanny! That’s not an easy bass line to pull off (consistently), but as far as I can tell, you did a flawless job here.
One thing I know I would struggle with (apart from consistency over the entire 3 minutes) is a lot of extra string noise (scraping etc) given the fast changes and the fast movements up and down the neck… I can’t hear any of that in your playing! Now, it could be the half rounds (which I have no experience with), but I would say it’s more likely that you have good technique One of my areas for improvement, for sure!!
Other than that: I can see you and @terb had some interesting discussion about tone and open strings - perhaps this could encourage some others here to post “alternate” versions of this song/bass line, featuring other tone options and other fingerings!?!
And, finally: please give us other shmucks with a day job a chance to keep up with you - otherwise, we might have to rename the thread to “Lanny’s covers”
Thanks @joergkutter! The bass line wasn’t hard to learn, but the quick changes were challenging. I doing several recordings and listening specifically to my bass line without the song playing, it was obvious that the half-rounds were most definitely the way to go.
Your suggestion to post or try other versions is a good one! I’ll go ahead and post the sheet music that I played to in case others may want to try and tackle the song using a different style. Personally, I tend to shy away from any online tabs and when ever possible always purchase the sheet music to learn any song by (a carry over from my guitar days)…
As for renaming the thread… This will always be @terb’s baby - besides, if I had to reply to all the posts on this thread like he does, I’d never have the time to learn a new song!
If you were me, and you wanted to try your hand at some covers but didn’t have a lot of time to go down a learning rabbit-hole because baby, and you had at your fingertips Audacity, GarageBand and Ableton (Live Lite), which would you choose?
Also, any tips for organizing a count-in when you’re playing over an original song?
I will give an advice for everybody here willing to do their first cover : choose a SIMPLE song. a song you really like, of course, but with a bass line you will be able to play without having to work at it during countless hours.
The fact is that for your first cover, you will have to figure out how to record, mix, host and share your work. Nothing really hard, but that’s a whole little workflow and I think it’s better to keep the things as simple as possible, just to maximize your chances to finish this little project that is your very first cover.
That said, and in the same logics, if you don’t know any DAW choose a simple one. I don’t know GarageBand but, for what I know, I think it would be a perfect choice for this purpose. Audacity is simple but very limited, and Live is a bit not-so-simple if you never used it.
I picked Audacity, knew nothing about recording oneself, but figured it out pretty quick via YT videos. Just to get the process down the first time. It is pretty limited software, but, in the beginning, you may not want to spend too much time on fine tuning details, you just want to record something.
Good luck, there are threads on here with good suggestions, looking forward to hearing your cover!
@infra - since I already had GarageBand on my MAC, that’s what I started with and still use as my DAW. It’s easy to learn to use, and came free on my MAC.
As for ‘count-in’ when playing to an original song, what I do is either use the built in count in feature and set it for either 1 or two bars, and/or move the original recording 1 or two bars into the track so that there is dead space before the song actually starts. This actually comes in really handy if you are also recording a video that will eventually be mixed with the audio recording.
As for song choice, @terb is spot on with starting with something easy…
somewhere between the Blues Countries and the Sludge Swamps, there is a band called Unsane.
Unsane - Against The Grain
I love Unsane, and this band is probably the one I’ve seen the most often playing live. I love a ton of Unsane songs but I had to choose ; this one illustrates pretty well what Unsane is, in my opinion. It’s from the album Visqueen, released in 2007.
I find the bass line on this song very interresting, it gives a dark, dirty, sticky ambiance to an overall very bluesy groove. Greenie works pretty well for this kind of heavy sludgy stuff, even if the SBV would have done the job too, but with a less nasty grind. On a technical perspective, we’re obviously in the Drop-D territory. There is not much difficulty except maybe the muting and finger noise management, as there is a lot of horizontal motion from consecutive notes. And the timing, as always with those down tempo riffs.
Also I modified the bass line a little bit : there are no chords on the original song, the chorus part is played only on the low D string. I just added the A string to make power chords, because why not playing those parts more heavily was too tempting !
Very well played @terb! VERY dark and nasty I would say, and Greenie was most certainly the best tool for the job.
Muting and finger management is always a main key in sound management and as usual, you performed exceptionally well, and your timing was spot on from what I could tell (I’m not too familiar with sludge/grunge).
This was WAY COOL!! A great modification that totally transformed and opened up the bass line riff. It was kind of like the song went from totally dark and dirty to showing a bit of translucency allowing it to open up just enough to expose itself.
One of my areas for improvement, for sure!!
This will always be 