In Progress Review
It has been a while since I shared some of my current works in progress due to personal circumstances forcing a break, but now this post aims to be an overview of projects that I shelved and am now returning to develop. Below you will find snippets taken from these in either demo form (as the whole audio mix currently exists), or as examples of melodic, or textural ideas lifted from the project. I will endeavour to briefly explain each of these snippets, how they were created, why, what makes them interesting to me, and how they may be developed in the future. I will also give some generalised context to the piece that the snippet belongs to, as some pieces have a particular compositional process.
Piece 1 - 'Calm of Storms'
This piece is being developed with an electric bass-centric view with an initial compositional aim of solely utilising the electric bass along with my current knowledge of audio engineering and manipulation to explore building a rich sonic landscape that blends typical and atypical approaches to playing the electric bass.
A simple diatonic melody performed with a traditional finger-style technique joined by an equally simple accompaniment. This accompaniment parts consists of two roles, root notes followed by two pedal tones played as harmonics rather than fully fretted notes. This part is quite easily performed on the bass as the harmonics are located in a position (7th) on the top two strings and under the fingers where the roots are available on the lower strings. It is likely this will be later separated or the root note removed as the root movement is doubled elsewhere, and it would allow the harmonic pedal tones to be manipulated separately in a more interesting way than just the current addition of reverb.
This idea of using harmonic pedals with a sustained and moving bass note is an easily accessible way where many bassists begin to explore alternate ways of playing the bass guitar. I used this accompaniment approach in a number of ensembles early in my career as an electric bass guitarist and in this piece I wanted to pay homage to that; to a simple idea but expressed in an expanded manner.
The ‘bass line’ sitting at the bottom of the track under-pins the harmonic textures with a strong rhythmic presence providing the majority of the rhythmic drive in the piece. This is a more typical part for a bass guitar to perform in terms of its duty to provide stable root movement and rhythmic information in the lower register, but technically there is a slight difference and a desire to move away from the typical timbres the bass would usually utilise in such moments. It is performed with a thick (5mm) felt plectrum rather than the more common plastic ones (or no plectrum at all!), the result is a muted attack sound like a soft ‘thump’ rather than a clear, clean, and tight attack. This along with palm muting the string and ghosting the 3rd and 4th semi-quaver notes of the groove help to create the soft rhythmic ‘chugging’ sound. I enjoy the muffled and lack of clarity that comes with this timbre, it goes against my general preference towards a clean, clean, and tight bass tone. In this case, it feels like this timbre has potential to eventually blend into the mix and provide support for the rest of the track.
One sound effect I have been enjoying experimenting with particularly is that of using multiple harmonics recorded separately and arranged in a pattern. In the above snippet 13 such harmonics were recorded and arranged in an ascending phrase, with a little reverb and delay effects added along with some left to right panning. There exist a few other examples of this idea peppered throughout this piece. Although I like this effect, there is more that could be done here to disguise their origin, homogenise them and get them to blend into the rest of the soundscape.
Following on from the previous point about disguising the harmonics, this example is one way which I have recently experimented with adapting these sounds. This particular example is four of the aforementioned harmonics but slowed down by a factor of >10 and looped to create a sustained chord that can be arranged to ring out indefinitely.
This snippet demonstrates all of the above elements combined. I find this piece is interesting and has scope that I am curious to explore further, both in terms of performance styles on the bass guitar and in the atypical manipulation of bass guitar audio. There is some refinement of texture that would also need to occur, and a continuation of the same compositional process feels appropriate. That this process seems to steer towards harmonic and melodic simplicity with splashes of divergence and complexity mainly in the disguisement of sound origin, continues to be indicative of the other pieces in development.
Piece 2 - 'Unexpected Journey'
This piece began as an exercise in meditative listening, a process I’ll detail in a subsequent article but essentially involves creating a low drone on a repeating loop, sitting and ‘listening’ or for an idea (audiation) to play and explore before attempting to create any sound on the instrument. In most cases the first idea heard is explored, worked out on the instrument, recorded, and then built upon if required. All of the ideas in this piece were developed in this fashion.
Before discussing some of the interesting compounds and musical ideas, it’s worth mentioning that the original process noted above became ineffective at this most recent stage of development. A point occurred when an idea being followed didn’t seem to lead to a satisfactory place. Other ideas were then tried with similar outcome leading to the feeling of hitting a dead-end. The initially promising ideas that arose became difficult to follow or to see through to what would feel like a natural conclusion or resolution. This occurs at around 3:25sec on the below clip where only a couple of the many ideas that were attempted remain. Plenty of disparate ideas that could ‘fit’ with the compositional direction of the piece came about but for some reason felt incongruent. Currently, development on this piece has stalled and will be revisited at a later date with a refreshed approach to the original process; or, failing progress- a slightly adapted approach to compositional development to overcome this hurdle.
The following are some examples of ideas that have occurred that I find interesting, enjoy, or feel have developmental potential:
This drone was the initial backdrop for this exercise and was created using a single recorded bass note (D0) which was time-stretched (around 100x longer) using the Paul Stretch program to last and loop indefinitely. I find this manner of creating sustained low notes to be interesting as the resulting audio contains a variety of idiosyncrasies and artefacts. No part of the sound is ever quite the same when listened to in a granular and detailed manner, but at the same time is consistent enough to provide a stable harmonic under-pinning for the track.
After the main melodic idea was put down then additional notes were recorded and stretched in a similar manner to create the low drone with root movement.
This snippet of the 2nd part of the melody consists of single notes, some harmonisation and a chordal resolution performed. Behind the melody is a supporting line which doubles and then harmonises, and is performed on the bass using an eBow, this allows a note to sustain in a way that is typically unavailable on the bass guitar. The general ideas is to have a note defined with its strong transient, quick decay and short sustain, to be then sustained longer by the eBowed note. There exists an upcoming decision whether to make these two timbres blend better, or keep them disparate and individually distinctive. There will be some differences nonetheless due to note choice and as the eBowed part doesn’t exactly follow the plucked part, but whether to follow a blended timbral approach or not is something to explore.
After the resolution on the melody the root note continues with a semi-quaver rhythm that mirrors compound rhythm discussed below. This could be a way to blend the melody from being in the forefront gradually into the background and at the same time highlighting the accompaniment rhythm or lower bass line that has so far existed.
This idea was one of the first that arose in developing this piece and its origins were apparent at the fore. Its harmonic makeup and rhythmic figure is quite reminiscent of a typical acoustic guitar accompaniment for a Celtic folk reel, I once toured in an ensemble that performed much of these forms of Irish tunes and I’ve been a lover of the style ever since. Once this texture was recorded it set the scene and tempo for the rest of the track to develop through.
The rhythmic harmonic texture is comprised of four individually recorded bass lines playing a single note semi-quaver rhythm with the same accents, performed with a wooden plectrum, and processed with a flanger effect. The notes that create the texture are D2, D3, A3, and D4 this dyad is ambiguous enough to allow the diatonic harmonic changes that occur through the main bass line and changing harmony of the piece in a similar way to the influence mentioned above. I am curious to explore this timbre further to see a few ideas can be developed: if a more subtle blend can be achieved; whether adding more harmonic content that follows the underlying root movement or builds upon the dyad is possible without getting in the way of the melody; and, to what extent can alternate effect processing help to achieve these ideas.
Piece 3 - 'As Above'
This early-stages piece demonstrates a technical idea of performing a bass-line-melody with a ‘rolling pedal tone’ above it. Inspired again from my previous experience in folk ensembles the 6/8 or ‘jig’ time-feel allows use of an adaptation of the Celtic roll technique that would usually occur on a violin or acoustic guitar as an accompaniment to a melody. I feel there is a great deal of potential to explore in this piece in terms of: 1) melody and form, the bass melody feels compact and could be expanded upon; 2) further sonically higher accompaniments to compliment the melody; 3) other approaches in flipping the track, meaning bass melody taking precedence and higher level elements supporting; 4) other technical developments utilising the Celtic roll.
Piece 4 - 'Undercovered'
Whereas other pieces in development have utilised some sort of main compound harmonic and rhythmic texture as accompaniment, in this piece there exists two such elements. Creating (and possibly expanding) these in such a way that they compliment each other and not adversely interact is an interesting challenge.
Firstly though I’ll mention the origin of this piece. It comes from the second part of a demo recording I made while practicing and playing around with distortion tones from a Sans Amp Guitar Amp Modelling pedal, and a simple bluesy call-and-response melody on the bass. This first part I have since dropped and decided to focus on this second section as a main base and launching off point for a new piece. Reasons for dropping this first part will be discussed in a subsequent article but suffice it to say for now that this brief play with distortion tones and bluesy style isn’t where my interest in bass-oriented composition currently lies.
This texture is comprised of four rhythmically repeating individual parts: a lower short ascending phrase; and three rhythmically identical harmonising phrases. Together the general timbre was aimed at sounding similar to a muted kalimba and was achieved technically by muting with the side of the right hand palm for a muted and quick decay, and plucking with the fingers for a muted but still strong attack. Typically when palm muting a bass-line the side of the thumb is used to pluck notes as this is ergonomically comfortable and helps to create a softer tone which is usually the point of palm-muting in the first place. In this case, however this creates a transient attack that is too soft for the effect wanted, hence the use of fingers plucked quite hard for more definition in tone. There is more that can be done here to tidy up the sound and make the parts more homogenous together and with the rest of the piece, but this the first example of creating a compound in this manner that I have explored and I feel this is an interesting sound to explore further harmonically, technically, and with post-performance effect manipulation.
This is a rhythmic compound that currently consists of only two parts. Firstly, a three-note semi-quaver ascending phrase with a fourth and octave interval structure (F2, Bb2, F3) that creates a three-over-four rhythmic phrasing; and second similarly quartal harmony but transposed up a wholetone (G2, C2, G3) but is an ascending and descending phrase grouped in five semi-quavers. This creates a revolving rhythmic texture that resolves on every 6th quarter-note beat. Below they can be heard acting together.
Together these create a curious imbalance and it will be interesting to explore how adding or subtracting more parts, changing of tones to blend the two parts less or more together, and to see how this generally effects this balance or how this may impact the further developmental steps of this piece.
Piece 5 - 'Polarity'
This demo example that contains a simple melodic fragment, bass chord accompaniment, and a mock-up drum kit and percussion part to demonstrate the general ideas of this piece. Whereas previous pieces in development mentioned in this article consist almost exclusively of bass guitar recorded and manipulated audio, this piece was originally conceived to contain additional instruments and collaborations from other musicians with parts that fit around these ideas. Such parts are yet to be construed and brings up a question of when these parts will be considered and what may the entail? Two main avenues may be considered and are currently undecided: 1) fill out as much (as feels appropriate) of the composition by exploring further bass guitar recording directions similar to previous pieces; or, refine current ideas to be more cleanly represented, tying them off so to speak, and then arranging other instruments around this more complete demo. The main questions that become apparent are: to what extent should this piece be developed with just the electric bass guitar before other instruments are included? Should further electric bass ideas be developed specifically with further instrumentation in mind?
For now, here is a brief overview of the ideas that currently exist in the demo.
This sound is simply an ascending collection of three harmonics performing a root, 5th, octave, pattern recorded separately. They currently have no post recording processing on them with the exception of a touch or reverb and it therefore is likely these will be further adapted to be a part of the following textures.
This texture consists of two similar parts performed with a wooden plectrum for a slightly duller tone than a plastic plectrum, and a touch of a spring reverb for a ‘slapback’ effect . The lower part alternates between Bb2, C3, and the higher part a fourth higher alternating Eb3 and F4.
These two compounds work with a third part which is an ascending arpeggiated bass chord. This harmony moves independently of the pedal textures of the other parts demonstrating harmonic progression. This relationship between the three parts is fledgling and exists currently as a representation of how the original ideas were quickly captured and a few minor effect processing ideas added. There is a great deal of scope for exploring these textures both individually and their inter-relationships as a larger entity in a similar way such questions have been asked in previous pieces.
Piece 6 - 'The All'
This rough rehearsal recording demonstrates a piece that was conceived during two collaborative composition sessions with guitarist Ed Keeble and drummer Brendan Bache, two musicians I have worked with both professionally and collaboratively many times in the past and whose approaches to musical collaboration are open, explorative, and knowledgable. The scope of this piece is to explore some bass guitar accompaniment ideas through a guitar trio ensemble. Due to the common difficulties in aligning timings and locations between busy working musicians for a collaborative project I began adapting this piece into a logic project to prepare for remote collaborations instead. This does mean moving away from some interesting avenues for exploring bass guitar practices within a strictly live context (which may still be possible at some stage) but does instead mean a shift in focus to online collaborations and the formulation of alternative or refined-through-recording ideas and processes.
This audio is an early-stages mock up of the same piece in preparation for remote recoding collaboration. In transferring the ideas from the rehearsal recording to the DAW to create a recording template a few questions came up which will be interesting to explore if this avenue is explored: 1) to what extent should the bass guitar part be performable? i.e. be a single part that could be played in a live context; if alternatively the bass can record layered parts, should the drums and guitar be able to do the same?; what interesting compounds can be achieved with the bass guitar and electric guitar together using similar approaches from previous pieces?
I hope this article has achieved its aim in demonstrating the current pieces that are in development after a rather long hiatus in reporting, writing, and discussing current projects. If one has any interest in discussing these ideas, approaches, or collaborating in some manner then please do get in touch via this site. As each of these pieces move closer to completion I will update this blog with more in-depth articles on each of them and further discuss approaches taken, decisions made, challenges encountered, and particular points of interest in the works.
Posted In: Reflections on Practice
Tagged: Bass Guitar, Composition, Development
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