Chris Fitzgerald said:
About A Train:
I think the feel is good, and the swing has a nice bounce to it. As a steel string player, I always find the gut tendency to be felt before the pitch becomes apparent a bit disconcerting, but that's a minor taste thing...the feel is solid on this one. The sound is nice and round, and the bounce is very even throughout.
Actually, I'm not exactly using gut. I'm using Velvet 180's, which are a little higher tension than gut, and have a synthetic core. They do have a pretty close approximation in sound and feel to gut.
I would imagine the
gut tendency you are hearing on the recording is much more a product of the room and the mic'ing technique than the strings. We recorded this in a small hall usually used for string orchestras, piano recitals, etc. Low ceilings, wood stage, and a very live room sound. My preference would be to do this with some isolation in a more controlled environment to get a more out front (but not direct) bass sound. However, it isn't too often that you get a chance to record playing a wonderful $175k Bosendorfer Imperial Grand. Given the choice between isolation with a keyboard piano (or lousy piano) and this, it was an easy choice. The sound you are describing is very similar to what you would hear from me in a completely acoustic trio setting sitting out from the stage.
The intonation is good for the most part (and again, the tracks that I'll be submitting are full of "intonation regrets" on my part), and there are a couple of places where the intonation gets a little shaky in similar situations, so I thought I'd mention them. On the tonic chord, your root, third and fifth chord tones are always in tune, but the 7th and 9th surrounding the root at the octave tend to come out flat, whereas the same notes (B and D on the G string) seem to come out in tune when they are parts of other chords. In my own playing, when this kind of thing happens, I usually find that any intonation issue can be traced back to the way I'm hearing the passage in question - I find that if I practice hearing things in more detail, the execution takes care of itself. In my case, the problem is that I sometimes tend to hear some notes as "less important" than others either by virtue of their "passing-tone-ness", their metric place in the line, or both. When I listen to recordings of performances after the fact, these notes are usually the ones that I find to be out of tune, and I make a mental note to hear each note more clearly even while I may be thinking of a broader gesture at the same time, kind of like dialing in the focus knob on an old TV set. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's the only way I know how to describe it.
Intonation? What's that?
Very perceptive comments, and you are right on the money. I really want to put more improv arco work in to start fixing some of this. Just doing the melody on the scrapped cut of Stella really opened my eyes to some work I need to do. 99% of the time when I'm out of tune, I'm flat.
Your bass sounds HUGE. I don't know if the prounounced fundamental is all bass or part proximity of the mic, but it's great to hear an acoustic sound that doesn't have any direct signal in it.
A little of both. It is very nice to hear. I've probably spent too much time working on my sound at the expense of other things (particularly velocity), but it is the
one thing I do I'm really happy with.
This Solano bass is just simply awesome. It just keeps getting better. I don't play a lot in thumb position, but I'm starting to more as the upper end keeps gaining a real cello like quality to the tone. It is taking some getting used to, especially the size, but I've never played a bass that projected as well. It doesn't seem that loud when you are playing, but when you get away from it the sound is huge.
Sometime (god knows when) I'll need to spend some time with gut strings on my backup bass to find out more about the way they respond. What is your action set like? High? Medium? Whatever the setting, that's a good healthy sound! If only my thick-topped monster could put out that much sound, I'd play a lot more gigs unamplified.
With gut, people who sat in would always tell me that my action was high, but it never seemed that high to me. Using the Velvet 180's, I've come down to more of a medium height that is a compromise. I haven't measured it, but I would guess the G string is around 6-7mm at the octave. People sitting in haven't complained anymore. I could go lower, but it seems harder to dig in. I gain some velocity, but (especially improvising) I don't hear that fast yet and I tend to BS too much when it is that easy. Thanks again for the compliment on the sound.
It is hard to do too many gigs unamped around here as the clubs here are huge, but it already has bailed me out to have that as an option. I was playing at a black fraternity party/ BBQ at a park near Univ. of Oklahoma. They were supposed to have provided a PA system, which they didn't. Even worse, they forgot to tell the parks dept. to turn on the electric. Playing outdoors with no sound support was going to be scary. However, it worked just fine and it was neat to watch people walking in the park start hearing the music from a couple of football fields away start bopping with the music.
Hope none of this comes off the wrong way, and if it does, stay tuned for your upcoming chance to participate in the TB Sampler version of "Paybacks are Hell".
Abosolutely none of it. It was all very constructive and gave me some solid things to work on, which is the whole point of this project. It's like getting private lessons with some objective ears.
I look forward to hearing some more of your playing soon.
Monte
