Got myself a new toy yesterday after work. Managed to slide in to the music store a few minutes before it closed. It's actually my xmas present from my parents. Long story short, I couldn't find a video camera at Christmas time that would work with my old laptop, and in the time since then I now have a webcam in my new laptop and also been borrowing a video cam from my bro that he seems ok with letting me hang on to long term (he upgraded a while ago). I've had several other ideas of what I might want but most of them seemed to involve more research and planning and at this point it seemed like it might be NEXT xmas before I got anything. I've been catching up on my Harmony class homework this weekend and I was hearing some bass bits in my head and thinking it'd be nice to have one to play them on.
So yeah. I had a couple moments of panic yesterday - what if I can't play it? What if it's a crap one and I should have done more research and gotten a better one? It's a Fender rip-off from what I can tell. Pretty basic. It should suit my purposes - adding my little bass lines to home recordings and such.
Anyway, I was working on my latest assignment, and I discovered that I could plug my acoustic in and use these virtual effects pedals that are in the new version of GarageBand and get a pretty rockin sound - I chose a dreamy texture for the guitar and liquid bass, lots of reverb. Found my chords, found a drum track that worked. And then I plugged in the bass. Started figuring out where the notes were, keeping it super basic. Set up GarageBand so I could do several takes in a row, and mid-way through one of those takes I got a huge smile on my face and thought "I'm having a blast!"
It was a moment of total fun and pure joy at what I was creating. I was doing it for me and because I liked the way it sounded. Something I don't think I've really felt in a while while doing music. Too many critical voices telling me that what I'm doing is boring, too simple, unoriginal, etc, etc. Too much trying to make things "follow the rules", not enough of the spontaneous just following my ears because they are the only things I have. And yet I WAS following some rules, the structure that was set up for the assignment. But it was kind of like an improv game - set up the boundaries and then let loose inside them.
The bit I came up with is still pretty much just a draft/sketch. A verse and a chorus. Enough for the assignment, not really ready for sharing out of that. I'm not sure if I'll ever develop it into a full song. The teacher might rip it apart when he grades it. But whatever happens, I'm so grateful for that moment of inspired joy. Glad to know it still exists and I could probably find it again. Tells me I made the right choice to buy the bass.
2 comments:
Yeah bass guitar! Keep it up hun!
Bass is pretty easy to get started with, by playing the root notes of chords to complement the rhythm guitar. Past that, if you know your basic chords, it's simple enough to build slightly more complex patterns. I've not yet needed to do much more than that.
One of these days I'm going to start with the bass line and build a song from that, though. That will be an interesting challenge for me, I think.
Post a Comment