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only one bass player

#81
two fingers said:
Tell you what...

Play a 9 chord on a 5 string bass guitar starting with open low B. Then play the same chord on a piano with B5 as the lowest note. One of them will sound great. One won't.
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I disagree - clean bass tone chords sound fine, assuming the bass is in proper tune of course. And also depending on your bass sound. How about playing the same chord on a Hammond B3 through an overdriven Marshall like Jon Lord?
 
#83
two fingers said:
Tell you what...

Play a 9 chord on a 5 string bass guitar starting with open low B. Then play the same chord on a piano with B5 as the lowest note. One of them will sound great. One won't.
Click to expand...

One thing that's impressed me about Phil Jones cabinets is their ability to cleanly reproduce a I-V double stop low on the B and E strings of a fiver. It's mostly if not all in the cab. The vast majority of cabs can't reproduce a clean low double stop, let alone a chord.
 
#84
Every Christmas in Chicago there is this gathering of tubas:

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You know it isn't something that is likely to become the music you listen to exclusively or to be your favorite but it works pretty well in small doses. The McBride/Brown/Clayton Superbass trio on the other hand bears extensive listening very well. Alas, it is no more although thankfully McBride is still with us.

Any symphony orchestra will have multiple basses and multiple kinds of instruments that live in the same spectral region that the double basses inhabit. Music can easily be written to gainfully employ more than one bass. Popular music is not typically written that way, other kinds of music often are. When you play in a large ensemble you have to quickly lose the notion that the bass range is your sonic space and the keyboard's left hand and the other instruments had better keep out of it. You must become part of a team of instruments that are all supporting the rest of the ensemble from the bottom end. The composer uses the combinations and solo passages of the various bass instruments not to play a unique "bass line" as almost all of us focus on almost all of the time but rather to produce a variety of sonic textures in the bass range as the bass instruments all play the same or complimentary "bass lines". It is the same thing they do with the mid range and the treble instruments.

I also sing in the church choir, as a bass of course! Now it is true that just as in an orchestra one reason to have multiple people singing the same bass line is just to increase the volume level and to add a literal chorus effect over what a single voice could produce. Amplifiers and chorus pedals make that unnecessary in an electric band. But we also frequently split into two parts and occasionally three. Even when we all sing the same line we will often be singing in unison with the tenors or doubling one of the up to five women's parts, occasionally in unison but more commonly an octave, or two, below. It is not impossible at all for an ensemble to have multiple basses, it just takes a lot more work on the composer's part to employ them intelligently.
 
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#87
okcrum said:
One thing that's impressed me about Phil Jones cabinets is their ability to cleanly reproduce a I-V double stop low on the B and E strings of a fiver. It's mostly if not all in the cab. The vast majority of cabs can't reproduce a clean low double stop, let alone a chord.
Click to expand...
Do you have a personal bottom limit, or do you even like the lowest power chord available on a fiver (F# over an open B - BTW do you Anglophone guys call this a "double stop" even if technically you're only stopping one?)?
My personal lower limit is E2 over A1 (the lowest available, not inverted, A-fifth on a standard-tuned bass: 55+82.407 Hz fundamentals). This is regardless of strings used - I don't like anything lower even on piano; it's actually a matter of fundamentals and lowest overtones, not "tone"; physioacoustics tells me the lower a vertical interval is, the closer frequencies are relative to critical bands:
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Masking occurs of frequencies "too" close to one another, and the brain attaches a feeling of roughness to these overly narrow intervals. Please note that my still-kosher A power chord has its fundamentals fall within the same critical band: in other words it shouldn't work but does, for me. That's why I don't discount your experience either; your brain may not find it particularly unmusical when two tones are masking each other because of proximity, especially when everything else is in order, harmonics-wise, above the deep bass area.


My position on the thread topic is, you have to either keep the two bass-lines (hyphenated to remark that one won't have typical supporting duties) well spaced from one another, or you have to through-compose, and plan unisons, or temporal slotting (actually always a good solution), beforehand. Pick your poison.
 
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#89
HaphAsSard said:
Do you have a personal bottom limit, or do you even like the lowest power chord available on a fiver (F# over an open B - BTW do you Anglophone guys call this a "double stop" even if technically you're only stopping one?)?
My personal lower limit is E2 over A1 (the lowest available, not inverted, A-fifth on a standard-tuned bass: 55+82.407 Hz fundamentals). This is regardless of strings used - I don't like anything lower even on piano; it's actually a matter of fundamentals and lowest overtones, not "tone"; physioacoustics tells me the lower a vertical interval is, the closer frequencies are relative to critical bands:
[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
Masking occurs of frequencies "too" close to one another, and the brain attaches a feeling of roughness to these overly narrow intervals. Please note that my still-kosher A power chord has its fundamentals fall within the same critical band: in other words it shouldn't work but does, for me. That's why I don't discount your experience either; your brain may not find it particularly unmusical when two tones are masking each other because of proximity, especially when everything else is in order, harmonics-wise, above the deep bass area.


My position on the thread topic is, you have to either keep the two bass-lines (hyphenated to remark that one won't have typical supporting duties) well spaced from one another, or you have to through-compose, and plan unisons, or temporal slotting (actually always a good solution), beforehand. Pick your poison.
Click to expand...

Actually, I was listening to another local player, and it sounded great - it was a D-A double stop. I heard none of the usual nonlinearity - that's what muds things up, when the cab or driver(s) becomes a mixer, not in the audio sense, but in the multiplier sense. It's possible the PJ cab rolled off the fundamentals of both notes enough to make this easier, since the listener psychoacoustically fills in the fundamental for BG.

I've always understood a double stop to be two notes sounded. That seems to be generally accepted.
 
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#92
Jazz saxophonist Henry Threadgill's early band X-75 had four bassists, along with 4 reed players and a singer.

I'm pretty sure Anthony Braxton has done something with more than one bassist.
 
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#93
hieronymous said:
I would love to play in a trio with another bassist and a drummer. You could trade off supporting and leading (the earth bass/air bass model), or just go nuts at the same time! It would require the right players and a vision.
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Exactly what I am going to do.

First rehearsal this Thursday!

My post about it here: only one bass player
 
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#94
mdlewis said:
Some of Bootsy's live shows had him and two other bass players on stage at the same time.

Check out

There are two guys in the back one one each side, each playing what look like Warwicks (one multihued, the other gold flake). I have no idea if all three of them were playing at the same time, but I'm guessing they were...
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I saw him this summer at the Paramount in Oakland and he had one other bassist in the band who usually played while Bootsy sang and did his Bootsy thang.
 
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#97
And by the way, just remembered this.

In the predominantly electronic duo I was in, Electro Jar, we often used more than one programed electronic bass on the tracks, and then further more I sometimes added a real physically played bass on top of that.

Like these three tracks for instance:

One of the last tracks we made together, a full blown phychedelic one, with tons of layers, without for that reason getting messy:


And this slightly older track.
Not too proud of the lyrics on this one, but quite happy with the percussion we managed to create as well as the physical bass I laid down, which is probably one of the best bass tracks I ever did.
The overall mood on this track has some reminiscence of something a disillusioned Berry White with a dark mindset could have made:


And finally this one, from the same EP as the first one, and the only one of the tracks mentioned here with regular singing vocals on it.
Also rather phychedelic (the physical bass applied to this track gets a bit messy and over the top at times, but quite floaty, which I think suits the overall mood of the track well):
 
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