Hey all.
I’m in Northern California (just a bridge away from 'ol @JoshFossgreen himself).
As a professional teacher and, mostly, session and gig player, this Quarantine thing has been… tricky.
My gig schedule is cleared through May, and all lessons have moved to the internet. So have rehearsals.
SO!
I’ve taken to some ideas to help keep the creativity and momentum moving forward.
I’ve sent out some jams to the fellas in my band (Bronze Medal Hopefuls) to keep things moving that way, and I’m crowd sourcing some metal out on Facebook, hoping to get people to add parts.
Anyone have some hopeful, creative ideas/tips/things they’re doing these days to still be social, still play, and still reach out?
(These Forums are a great way to do all that… so, thanks all!!)
Great thread @Gio! sounds like you’ve got basses covered!
For me, I’ve spent the last couple weeks helping out my Navy buddy who I’ve played guitar with for years with his teenage grandson who decided he wanted to take up bass. Working online with him and he just played a (somewhat minimal but at speed) version of Readymade by RHCP’s. Might have to do a cover on it even though it’s not my favorite genre of music, but still fun to learn a bit of Flea’s bass style.
Something that I’m toying with a bit is coming up with some bass riffs to some of the classical music that I listen to. Many years ago I was classically trained on the guitar. Although Back in the 50’s and 60’s it was not what I wanted to play, the music still stuck and now that I’m much older I have grown to respect and enjoy it much more than when I was younger. Now I listen to it and dream up bass lines to the compositions… Kinda cool. Might have to work on something.
This probably sounds like a weird idea, but I’ve been seriously toying with it in my mind this past week, and it ticks all the above checkboxes. So after getting through B2B, and just being persistent as possible with learning bass, I had the opportunity to jam with others, play in a band for a time, and other really terrific social moments with playing bass over the past 4 months. Super grateful! Each was a small step, and a learning experience too. I wanted to start my own project of some kind, or collaborate on something at some point. And, the very best musicians to be found are, well… bass players!!
What about a band, where we’re all band members, we all play our bass collectively together (at home, done via Zoom, or something)? I mean, maybe even the world’s largest band of just bass players?! It gives each and every person a chance to be in a band. And have the experiences of having bandmates. To create with, to share with, to fight with, to just rock’n roll! Young or old. Any corner of the world. Played for years, or just started yesterday. Health challenges, life challenges, doesn’t matter. All are welcome, only criteria is you have a bass, and want to be in a band!
We could do stuff like synchronized chugging your E string, pretty simple. Rumble the world with low notes! Or play basslines together, or some members play a higher register, who knows, these are just a few ideas. And all band members would have a vote, we could even use the vote feature of the forums. Maybe if you’re a leader or manager, and do extra stuff, like the social media or organization, you get slightly more voting power.
Thoughts anyone? Fun idea, or a little too far out there? Would anyone even want to be in the band if I got it going??
I would love to be able to do this but it’s not technically feasible. There is too much delay involved in communications and the delay is inconsistent based on a lot of different factors.
Josh talks about it some in this video…
As good as our communications are it’s unlikely we will ever have the ability to do the instantaneous communications required for something like this. Even if we were all communicating with dedicated fiber optic links their would still be delay introduced when the light is converted back and forth to an electrical signal.
Also going over Josh’s course and working on my John Entwistle basslines. I have most of “Another Tricky Day” figured out . . . and believe me, every day these days is tricky!
So one thing my friend and I do is pass around DAW projects in a shared Google Drive folder. He will lay down part of a track and then I’ll add bass, etc. The only problem with that is we would all be adding bass
I tried doing this one time by recording several tracks of bass lines played in different octaves and with different bass’s… Sounded like a cage full of constipated gorillas all trying to take a shit at the same time…
Sounds like most of the music I like… You gotta post this on the “original music” thread!
A noble goal! But I think @eric.kiser is being real when he says the technology is not there. I asked my tech-wizard-drummer-buddy the same thing for a proposed “live-in-2-places-at-once” streamed concert. She said not possible. But…
This is always doable! And if the files go up on Soundcloud (like we’ve done for other projects in the past) everyone can get in there and make things with other folks’ ideas.
That last idea is the one I’m using to try and connect musically right now. It’s the most feasible and easiest to share.
Video-mash-ups are good too.
Anyone used the Accapella App? Seems designed to do collaborative video/music projects.
Great video share, felt like we were hanging with Josh there in his music room with his basses in the background! And yeah, you’re right about the latency and other issues with the actual music. I guess everyone playing through Zoom all at once would probably be a muddy mess, not to mention, my computer speakers kinda suck anyway, so it might be made even worse! Maybe just using Zoom to check in with the bandmates then for coordinating timings, and hashing out band business. Or maybe this is just my idealism speaking
Ok, this will then just have to be on your honor, you played at a certain time with the world! I’ll kick it off, play along if you can: 5 minutes of chugging your E string at 80bpm, (quarter notes or 8th notes, your choice) with your amp turned up as loud as you can. Begins at 12 noon, US Mountain time, Friday, Mar. 27th. (11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 6pm London, 5am next day Sydney)
It may just end up being a solo act, but still gonna rock it!
There’s a handful of them have done it between themselves at home. Not sure how they do it as I haven’t been to that open mic in ages - just saw some posts about it on a chat group. I’ll have to tell them about this acapella thing.
