Bass cover and tutorial videos – Online bass lessons
This week I started to put some bass tracks with my friends of Lulas Belhas. As this year I haven’t made any special Christmas video, I post here Lulas Belhas’ Christmas message (in Portuguese).
Of course you can still re-visit some of my previous Christmas clips, such as Run With The Fox, Personent Hodie or Silent Night.
I would like to wish to all friends throughout the internet Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Hoping all the best for 2015!
Thank you, as always, for being here!
Miguel
Here is a remastered version of my early cover of Astral Traveller. The previous version had some very primitive video effects with the story of the Portuguese Flag, which I just removed this time. The bass was significantly boosted and a bit processed with some compression. I hope it’s more audible now, considering YouTube’s more recent HD encoding should also help to make a better sounding video.
Bass: Rickenbacker 4001 CS
Strings: Rotosound Swing Bass RS66LD (45-105, stainless steel)
Preamp: Sansamp Bass Driver DI (BDDI)
Effects: Amplitube 3 – Ampeg B-15R, T-RackS CS Vintage Compressor 670
Signal path: Bass→BDDI→PC→Amplitube→T-RackS
And now for something completely different… It’s… one of my ever favourite basslines, played by REO Speedwagon’s Bruce Hall.
Continuing to present my video recordings from Bulgaria last summer, we travel to the southeast, to the Pirin mountains. The festival “Pirin Sings” was one of the highlights from my stay in Bulgaria. You will see the atmosphere of this festival: performances, rehearsals and surroundings – all in a beautiful scenery of Predel, Razlog. The main purpose of this festival is to preserve the authenticity of the artistic traditions of this region of Bulgaria.
If you do recognize the groups of artists or the songs here performed, please write me so I can add this information to the video annotations.
Thank you and I hope you enjoy the images!
Some videos that I made during this summer’s visit to Bulgaria. This is a festival organized for Bulgarian folk groups living abroad. It was a hot day in Malka Vereya, next to Stara Zagora and the different groups and artists performed all day long. As you can see, the public constantly joined the show for the dances. If you are familiar with Bulgarian folklore and you know some information about the songs and artists here shown, please let me know so I can add the information here.
Congratulations to Kevin Mulryne for Episode 150 of the Yes Music Podcast!
For some years now, the YMP has been the reference podcast about our favourite band, gathering fans from all over the world. For this episode, Kevin also asked for the listeners to record and send YMP announcements in their own native language, which I did. On this episode you will travel through some moments of the YMP throughout the times, including an excerpt of an interview with me on episode 69.
I recovered one of my first covers from 2008, “A Venture” from “The Yes Album”. Little I knew back then that in fact the bass that Chris Squire used for this song was his white Fender Telecaster and not the usual Rickenbacker!
I did a Yes Album cover “spoof” with me in the empty chair, with a little big help from my friend Milton Trajano.
Then I added a take I had recorded on the previous day, where I missed a few notes in the end.
Our friend D Michael Thorn, long time Yes fan and fellow bassist, has got in touch sharing his memories of Turn of the Century being played live in 1977 :
” (…) Chris tuned his bass CADG. I saw them here Oct 8, 1977 on the GftO tour. I was in front of Chris at the stage barricade, so I was less than 3 meters from his pedals and mic stand. I remember watching him play this song where he would play the harmonic at the 12th fret of the E string, but it sounded a C. Also, noticed that he uses lots of upstrokes while playing this song, as opposed to the usual downstrokes. As for the pedals, I’m not sure if he recorded those or not, but live he would often use them and his effects in places that weren’t on the recordings.”
This is indeed great information. Not only Chris did use the Triumph bass to reach the high F sharp on the 23rd fret, as he also played the bass tuned in a low C, using the 12th fret harmonic to play the C I am playing on the 8th fret. I must say I did think about this possibility after watching the recent shows where Chris did use a low C on his Tobias extended range, but then I “decided” that it was something he came up with in the last 2 decades. With this information from D Michael Thorn, we find Chris using a low C back in 1977, which is only as adventurous as he’s always been… I have no idea how many bass players had made this kind of tuning back then!
So, my version, stays as “friendly” for standard tuning, but I will try to re-listen again the whole song to listen to that open low C. Of course the other passage which would suffer some changes are the octave leaps in E, in which now I would have to use the 4th fret of the E string, rather than the open string.
Thank you very much, Michael, for your insight on Chris’ playing!
Here’s D Michael Thorn’s Soundcloud page
Turn Of The Century – Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful Yessongs of all, and again, with one of the most fascinating basslines by Chris Squire. Many peculiarities about it as well. Chris played a Gibson Triumph bass, which is a short scale bass. The tone is quite different from the usual, more discrete and less aggressive. However, it allowed Chris to play the higher registers a lot, due to the large number of frets, going to a high F sharp. I asked my good friend Américo Silva at Music Light for one of his basses which had that range and I chose his beautiful blue Alembic Essence. The tone of the bass is wonderful and I really couldn’t seem to achieve the same “middy” timbre of the Triumph bass. Doing a lot of EQ would rather spoil the Alembic’s tone, so I opted to let the bass speak by itself. The bassline is, again, exquisite – not a single note is played with less care than the other, and often seems to leave the main chord tones, to derive as a counter melody, sometimes beautifully dissonant. In addition, the bass pedals work bring even more drama – as Chris plays also some very bold passages with scales provoking chord inversions, suspensions and yet more dissonance. I listened to several bootlegs and footage of the 1976 sessions to try to compute how the bass pedal line could be played, as the album version is almost criminally undermixed on the pedals (as it happened on some other Yes albums such as Tormato). In fact, I believe that there are more bass pedal passages on the song but the ones I played were the ones I thought had the best chance to be right. Let’s hope that more new formats of mixes will come out, as it seems to be a trend nowadays, and they this part of Chris Squire’s work will come to the surface so we finally get to hear more of his treasures!
Download the full transcription by Simon Gilman, here.
Bass: Alembic Essence
Strings: Rotosound Swing Bass RS66LD (45-105, stainless steel)
Signal conditioning: Boss LM-2 (limiter)
Preamp: Sansamp Bass Driver DI (BDDI)
Signal path: Bass→LM-2→BDDI→PC
I was recently invited by gigg.com to enter a bass cover competition, so I decided to enter with my video of “Heart of the Sunrise”. If you have the time please vote on the link below (registration needed). You can vote every day. If this is too much trouble for you, and I understand perfectly, just watch the clip or share this link with your friends. Thank you very much! http://www.gigg.com/w/23395
Miguel Falcão (miguelbass)