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Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing thread
- Thread starter ttasselm
- Start date
And what, good sir, would this luxury purchase have been, had it gone through?
I was looking at a fretted F Bass BN5. I think if the pickups and electronics were quieter on my fretless BN I might've made the move, but there's just enough noise that adding gain and delay/reverb builds up a layer I can't abide. My existing basses are really beyond sufficient, including my 5 string with EMGs which are dead silent.
Well, that definitely qualifies as a luxury purchase... Those are like 5k or so, right?
You play fretless a lot?
Yeah. It was a BIG price tag. I don't play fretless much, but I do enjoy it. I snagged my BNF5 for a relatively low price. The BN5 prices are just beyond what I can stomach. It wouldn't bankrupt me, but it exceeds my luxury/embarrassment intersection. I figured $5k of effects pedals and modules and VST updates will go a lot farther in my music adjacent activities, and instead of one lump purchase I can do a little damage each month and flip things along the way. without having to make an all or none choice (yet).
Two things prevented me from pursuing a career in music: being told that bass guitar “isn’t an instrument” when I wanted to study it in university, and figuring that I don’t like hanging out in bars. I wouldn’t say I was otherwise smart in life choices, more like fortunate.
Part of my day job now is teaching graduate students. They are also fed the “follow your dream and nothing else matters” line, which I do my best to undermine by making radical and apparently unusual suggestions like taking time off each week, having hobbies and other interests, and maintaining human relationships.
To @Ugly’s point about “music is its own reward” works if you’re already getting paid— I saw Jonas Hellborg say something about commitment to art and ignoring commerce, and I’m like “dude, you are endorsing bass strings.” I profoundly respect him as a player but come on.
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I’ll take one of those for the Vermona Perfourmer mk2, or a Joranalogue Orbit 3 or Compare 2.
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So do you work out something, record it for the duration of the piece, and then find something else that goes with it? Or do you start with a patch and then plot something out? Or do you record a bunch of bits and pieces and then assemble a piece in the DAW?
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My pleasure! Thanks for answering. Eurorack’s sheer infinity is a thing. I think you’re right to focus on control though. Every sequencer or control surface brings its own way of making music. I’m a big fan of the Vector though I’ve put it away to see if I like the Hapax better. I’ve been eyeing some kind of touch control surface, like the 0-coast or a Morph.
My whole Euro is put away for the moment but I’m thinking about assembling a small modulation and control rack to do things that are hard to do in MIDI.
apropos our modular as effects for live instrument conversation bit ago:
I was just about to come here and share that one. Some cool ideas for getting the synth to interact with one's playing. This is something where I feel like I've barely dipped a toe into the kiddie pool.
I kind of find myself gravitating toward a call-and-response sort of thing: play some stuff on one instrument, then answer to it with another instrument, even if it's just a timbre/volume swell or having a footswitch momentarily transpose a drone. I like the idea of having some of that happen more automatically though.
Now I'm thinking about capturing pitches and using them for that. I bet I could set up something "good enough" with Marbles... maybe put the Deja Vu under footswitch control, so I can stop to have it grab new pitches and otherwise it keeps what it already learned.
Right now I've got an album to master though, so I'll have to save the experiments for afterward...
The talk of pursuing a career in music full time reminds me of my music teacher…
He went to university and graduated in another instrument but mainly plays / teaches bass.
Was having to work 3 jobs teaching plus do his ok paying country gigs… so pretty much all week non stop and was earning less than my admin job and not much above poverty line . I decided I’d rather have money to buy a house / raise a family abs have a hobby of music than go hell for leather in it and barely have money for food and bills… unsure how it is in America or other counties but in aus, even well known musicians here barely earn anything unless it’s one of the very few that win the lottery.
He went to university and graduated in another instrument but mainly plays / teaches bass.
Was having to work 3 jobs teaching plus do his ok paying country gigs… so pretty much all week non stop and was earning less than my admin job and not much above poverty line . I decided I’d rather have money to buy a house / raise a family abs have a hobby of music than go hell for leather in it and barely have money for food and bills… unsure how it is in America or other counties but in aus, even well known musicians here barely earn anything unless it’s one of the very few that win the lottery.
Got weird with the Zoia tonight. Programmed some granular nonsense and a short sequence from Bloom made robot noises. Mission accomplished.
been there. music is definitely not a meritocracy.
quit when i had my first kid.
yes . . .
a little of all of that. conceive/patch, record, listen, rerecord(or not), listen, decide to move on or jettison, listen some more, decide on what's needed, patch . . . listen, add/subtract/cut up/move . . . etc., until it's "done'
and then i do a lot of thinking of contrast (density, rhythm, etc.) and then come up with a whole grouping.
my thing is trying to inject some variability (best word i can come up with right now) either through programmed/patched chance modulation or through actually playing a touch surface.
0-control is cool. somethings about it are still a mystery to me, but it can do some very cool things. i also have the pressure points module, which is cool, but doesn't do everything that the 0-control does (sequencing, more pads).
the morph seems like a good choice, as it can interface with other formats.
but you have a linnstrument? it seems like a midi to cv convertor might be handy with that. i actually set up my hydrasynth desktop to sends three layers of control to the eurorack stuff through it's polyaftertouch pads. pretty sure you could do that with an mpe controller that either sent cv or you convert the midi/mpe to cv
