September 6th and 7th: rediscovering the self
Recently, I’ve been musing on wisdom delivered by Victor Wooten in this interview. Victor phrases it better than I ever could, so I won’t botch the messaging through poor paraphrasing, and simply state that I’ve been on a quest over the past week to allow my intuition and unbridled curiosity to guide my playing, and see what comes out as an end result.
And so, tabling cover songs for the time being, I’ve been diving into improv jams with the looper pedal. What has emerged is, at the very least, interesting. Some of it grooves. Some of it doesn’t. A good amount is mad awkward. It’s a beautiful mess, and I selected the more palatable captures to upload to the youtube machine.
First up: this improv jam I did on Wednesday the 6th turned out pretty cool:
It’s a simple I - IV progression, but there’s a neat little melody hook I stumbled onto about 90 seconds into the video, that might be worth turning into something.
One thing I’ve (re)recognized through these is how often I tend to overplay on the bass. In this simple trio format, with the bass recorded last, I feel like there is some validity to overplay in these scenarios. However, there’s a thin line between this circumstantially-appropriate behavior and a bad habit that’s at risk of further engraining into my playing style. So I’m gonna have to be sure to keep that in check going forward. For now it’s just fun :-).
September 7th:
DAP Test:
The “DAP” Test that I’ve done previously (April 15th) is essentially just a collection of riffs and chord progressions that manifested through jamming over the winter and spring months, and over time it settled into a solid, ordered structure. It has evolved into a good potential backdrop for a song, ripe for either vocals or lead instrumentation to soar on top. “DAP” stands for “Double-Apple Pie”, which illustrates the naming conventions I take when writing my own songs; it’s all food names ;-p.
This is a tune that I’d like to build more into a complete studio recording which could perhaps function as a demo for exploring collaborations in the future. Biggest problem I have at the moment is my post-production skills; the more time I spend processing and mixing a tune, the worse the final mix seems to end up. That’s 100% a psychological hindrance, so I will cross that bridge after the season changes, and accept the mediocre audio quality for the time being. More important at the moment to keep on playing while the weather is still good.
Next up from the day was another chill jam:
This is an example where I abandoned my preconceptions of what constitutes a “right” or “wrong” note, and it sort of organically settled into a classic I - vi - IV progression, which was fun to play over. This is the type of recording I hope to properly mix and master this winter, with the vague goal of creating an album of sorts with the best of these loop improvs.
And this last jam is where I really started bending the rules of modalities (within the context of harmony) all over the place:
A strange phasing effect occurs when I try to bolster the audio mix for these, and I think it still has to do with tracks not quite lining up when mixed together, despite my diligent use of Waveform as my primary DAW. It’s all good though, I kind of like the effect. Just wish it was a little bit less random. I’ll figure it out one day.
Through the post-production of these jams, I’ve been trying to test the final render between three devices: computer (workstation), budget-grade headphones, and an old smartphone. The goal is for the audio to be relatively balanced on all three devices, with the smartphone speaker acting as the “crap-test”, the lowest bar to hit. Balanced studio monitors are the ideal when striving for the high bar of production, but I’ve been having major issues with mine (they have been heavily used for playback while recording) and so I’ve been dependent on the computer/workstation speakers, which are surprisingly good. I hope it yields a good enough result for now. Balanced headphones might be a necessity going into the winter for fine-tuning these mixes.
That’s probably enough verbiage for now. Good ol’ stream-of-thought writing.
Two more weeks of prime weather conditions! I’ll capture what I can while I still can.