Robert was a killer bassist - his bassline to Plush is so melodic and gorgeous. His playing was such an integral part of that band’s character. Thanks for bringing some of that good stuff to the forum!
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he seems to be still active as a bass player, Wikipedia says that he recorded five songs in 2019 with a japanese band called “B’z”. (I don’t know this band at all)
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Wait, I though B’z were like ballad-pop. I’ll have to check.
edit: hmm, there is some of that but they seem mostly GnR-style hard rock. Still not where I would have pegged him going but not as surprising as I thought.
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Never tried a video cover before, so did a home recording just now on my iPhone. The song is “Naive” by The Kooks. I only heard this song (and of this band) 3 weeks ago - the new fellows I was jamming with wanted to us to learn 5 covers in a week. I only had time to semi-learn one, and haven’t played with them again yet. At first I wasn’t a fan of the song, but one of them said this was their fave song for years. Now it’s grown on me a lot - probably would have been into it if 15-20 years younger, I like these Brit pop type songs!
I have to ask, how do you all get the sound quality so good on your videos? The bass notes get picked up at different volumes on mine, and the levels of the bass vs. the backing track are not right. I may stick to audio only, as you can make these adjustments with DAW software. (And do some cut & paste, I ended 2 bars early 
) But good excuse to wear my bass clef cap!
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congratulations @Vik , you made the 50th cover since the begining of this thread ! that’s awesome !
that’s a nice cover, you seem to have learned to bass line pretty well. I didn’t knew the song but I heard no obvious mistake and your attack / plucking technique seems pretty clean. the only thing I noticed is some timing issues, it’s floating a bit sometimes, but this point is hard (maybe the hardest ?) and requires a lot of time of practice. anyway that’s fine, very cool cover ! also I like your bass clef hat ! 
About the sound quality, in fact we don’t use the audio recorded by the camera. we record on a DAW like a normal studio session, and we record the video on another device. then we do the production/mix on the DAW, we export the audio and we create a new video with this audio track synchronized with the video part from the camera. it’s pretty easy, and it probably seems more complicated than what it really is if I remember, I believe that @Lanny made some tutorial PDFs on his site.
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First, let me congratulate you on submitting the 50th cover @Vik!! And I do love the bass clef hat! I’m loving that tone on the Ibby… I can pick up on a bit of timing, but that I believe may be resolved if you were to record through a DIA (or direct cable) into a DAW. There are two ways to record yourself, and I’ve used both.
One way as @terb mentioned would be to lay down your bass line to a song - I use Garage Band since it came free on my MacBook Pro. The big key item here is when doing the video portion, that you play the song exactly like you played it when creating the audio portion.
The other way that I probably use most is to just record both audio and video at the same time. For this I still record directly into my DAW, but when I’m doing that, I am also using my Mac’s Photo Booth app to record the video. Granted, there is no sound on the video, but at least all of my notes match up ‘pluck 4 pluck’ when I go to match the audio and video together.
I use the iMovie app on my Mac to match the audio and video for both ways - I don’t like the one that is included in the GB app but that’s just my opinion…
A ton of fun, and you did a great job on that cover!! Looking forward to the next one!!
Keep on Thumpin’!
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As far as sounding even and having even levels goes, there’s a lot of post-processing you can do in any DAW. One of the most common is to normalize regions. You can think of this as applying compression to individual parts of a track to even out the volume.
The first thing I would do is normalize the whole backing track so that it’s peaks are at about -4dB. And then do the same, normalize your bass track to the same level. Once that is done, your bass track peaks will be at -4dB but you will probably still have areas that are quieter. If that wasn’t intentional, you can select those regions and normalize them up individually.
At that point both the bass track and the backing tracks will be normalized to max volume. Now you need to mix them with track and master volumes so they sound good.
That’s just one way; you can also use built in compression in most DAWs, and other methods. You also want to consider noise reduction when normalizing levels. But with a little messing around it’s pretty easy to get relatively even levels throughout a mix.
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Can someone decode these acronyms please? I’m around too much military alphabet soup I can’t keep up. DAI &DAW?
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DAI - Digital Audio Interface, basically a sound card in a box
DAW - Digital Audio Workstation, software running on your computer for nonlinear editing of audio. GarageBand/Logic, Audacity, Reaper, Ableton, etc.
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Aha! Yes, this sums it up - the sound is just really bad through a phone’s camera, and, I have to say, almost unusable! I was really wondering how your video’s sound was so clean.
Super useful! And, I just went to your website, these are really nice PDF’s you’ve created to help people record. Here is the link. I see a section called “Making a Movie Cover” there Coming Soon, no pressure, but your movies are really well edited 
, if you decide to make PDFs, let us know, you have some good knowledge there!
Looks like there are many ways to go about this. Thanks guys, on the suggestions. If I do another video cover, I think the sound quality will be much better! I wish there was an easier way though 
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Thanks for doing the cover 
Basically the most key advice is you want to be recording the audio with an audio interface and not the phone mic. Most else you can fix up in the editors.
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Way to go, @Vik!
Especially also that you came out of left field to snatch the “50” award from our cover kings, @terb and @Lanny
Above all else, though: you are again among the trailblazers here - sharing a cover (and a video cover no less), where many of us others either don’t dare or blame it on technical (i.e., recording) challenges (raises both hands 
)
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@Vik Congratulations on taking the #50 spot!
I was perfectly fine with the quality of your video. The bass was in the forefront and easy to listen to. For me, that’s the most important thing for these videos.
Yes, @terb and @Lanny put out more professional videos, but that’s never been a requirement for this thread.
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And this is so important, that I want to stress it for anyone new to playing bass. It’s not only understandable, but you’re almost supposed to have imperfections and “mistakes”, on a beginner friendly forum like this. There are plenty of bass virtuoso sites, and, while they are inspiring, for someone that’s just starting or learning, you need somewhere too, to post what you have, and get encouragement, and feedback too, if you want it.
So - even if you just first picked up a bass yesterday - all good - we want to hear you!!
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Yes! Yes! Yes!
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that’s so well said ! 
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OK… So I missed the 50th Cover Celebration, but I couldn’t be happier that one of our B2B Alumni (@Vik) took the award!!
This cover that I’ve been working on is NOT anything like I have ever done before…
The song I chose is one that I use to play quite frequently on my '52 Fender Telecaster, and one that I always considered to be my “Crossing Into” ROCK song… (Back in the day)… Slam this song on the ‘52 and I can play any friggin’ thing on my Tele sort of song…
What I realized when I completed the B2B course and graduated as a full fledged B2B “Badass”, was that even though I could (somewhat) still play this song on my Tele, I needed to play it on my bass… My arthritis has gotten so bad that it’s hard for me to really get down and do the song justice…
Realizing that at my age I deal with health Sh!t like arthritis, and I can’t play my Tele like I use to, I figured that I would just use what I can play now… My bass’s…
Most know that I took my original Yamaha TRBX174EW and turned it into my “BEAD” bass… Also, My Yamaha TRBX304 with “Half-Rounds” has always been one of my favorites to play.
In this cover (Nothing fancy on the video) I have featured both… please understand that I have been dealing with a bad case of arthritis in my wrists and fingers, so my timing and ability to hit every note is not what it should be, but the biggest take away from this cover should be the the comparison of tones… Listen to “Big Red” in the beginning (had to play with my wrist support on) and then compare to the tones of “Mango” tuned in BEAD for the last half of the song… no wrist support because it was easier to play without it…
https://go-low.billlanahan.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/FrankenFunk49fb-SD-480p.mov
Or if you’d prefer a higher resolution…
Comment all you want… I’m an old “Thick Skinned” Diesel Submarine Sailor anyway so nothing anyone can say will wrinkle any of the skin on my ass… (it’s already wrinkled anyway)
This might be my last cover for awhile for several reasons…
- I would love to see and hear others post their creations
- My goal for B2B was to play THIS song on bass
- Spring is here and I wanna play outside
- Repeat all the above…
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Whoa that’s really good, Lanny. A lot of technical skill on display there. Those breakdowns do not look easy.
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I’m just a beginner… I can’t do chords; pop; slap; or any of the other $h1t that I don’t like to do…
But,… I would have never been able to do what I do now with my bass’s had I not have taken @JoshFossgreen’s B2B course!!
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