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Post by blackcountrymick on Feb 24, 2015 10:46:49 GMT -6
Tbone. well done with overcoming all those DAW technicalities, you guys might just temp me away from my stand alone digital recorder and come across to the dark side especially as I have very recently got myself a small 15w/1w tube amp that can communicate with a computer via usb and also does split wet/dry signal so is capable of being re-amped. I can certainly see the fantastic benefit of being able to alter/add tone and effects after recording, but it is way outside my comfort and knowledge zone at the moment. Looking forward to hearing (and seeing) more stuff tbone. .....so....its video capability next then? .
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Post by joachim on Feb 24, 2015 11:54:46 GMT -6
tbone, great you got it working. It was a nice tune - looking forward to more to come!
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 24, 2015 12:05:05 GMT -6
Beautifully played and beautifully recorded Tbone, sounding excellent! Jeez Mick got a new amp, Joachim got a new guitar, Rich got a new guitar AND a new amp...I guess I'll console myself by putting a new set of strings on my guitar
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Post by cunningr on Feb 24, 2015 17:14:28 GMT -6
Tony that was a bit more than noodling I really liked the tune, maybe in a year or 2 I can venture into some jazz. Now that your using a daw you'll quickly realize how fun it is to work on the mix. I like to expand my set up, just to noisy to do any serious mic recordings.
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Post by Phil on Feb 24, 2015 17:56:42 GMT -6
Great Jazz tone, T-Bone. Where did you find the backing track?
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Post by bluesbruce on Feb 24, 2015 18:09:30 GMT -6
All right, Tbone, way to go! Now come on and give us some details... was that using your Behringer unit? what about the backing track? any kind of effects? Sounding nice.
Bruce
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Post by Phil on Feb 25, 2015 7:01:54 GMT -6
BTW,I'd love to record some bass, too, but I'm rather unsure whether I can also plug in anything else but a guitar(I even have an old ZOOM drum machine somewhere) or if I need something more versatile than the BEHRINGER unit?!? Or is something like a Bass amplifier simulator needed for this purpose? Greetings, t. T-Bone, You can make your guitar sound like a pretty decent bass guitar with the stock plug-ins that come with Reaper - a pitch shifter and EQ. With the pitch thing you lower your sound by 1 octave and with the EQ you cut back on the high frequencies. Listen to my recordings of "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Drivin' Blues" I did the bass using the above technique. Oh, I also played with my thumb to give it a fuller more bassy sound.
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 25, 2015 11:30:04 GMT -6
For bass I use my bass amp running direct into my Pod Studio, then run it through the Pod Farm software using no amp sim or effects. Before I got that amp I used the bass amp sim's in Pod Farm; I don't know anything about the Behringer unit or the software you're using, but if you can download some bass amp sim's from Native Instruments (is that what you're using?) I'd certainly give that a try. Otherwise you could see how it sounds through the guitar amp sim's or with no amp sim at all.
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Post by blackcountrymick on Feb 25, 2015 12:00:11 GMT -6
Thanks, Phil, those are great tips, and yor recordings prove that soundwise this works well - but I'd love to play the real thing (after all, that's what I got it for) Jack and Mick, you are the Bass players here, I doubt you wouldn't know how to best plug in the instrument... do you use the same device and software? I don't have a bass amp as such but I do have various ways of plugging in my bass to my digital recorder, in fact I can plug my bass direct into the recorder (Boss BR800) and generate tones and effects within the unit. I also have used my pod, yamaha THRC and Digitech BP355 to record my bass into the boss recorder. These units also have computer recording capability via usb as well and even have software packaged with them such as Cubase LE but I have not ventured into trying this yet.
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Post by jack1982 on Feb 25, 2015 12:27:10 GMT -6
I don't know anything about the Behringer unit or the software you're using, but if you can download some bass amp sim's from Native Instruments (is that what you're using?) I'd certainly give that a try. Thanks, Jack, I guess that's the way to go... let's see what we got here: www.igniteamps.com/en/audio-plug-ins I think there's also something like Amplitude out there... Here's a couple of videos on how to install VST plugins into Reaper if you've never done it before If that doesn't work then try this:
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Post by Phil on Feb 25, 2015 16:04:38 GMT -6
Thanks, Phil, those are great tips, and yor recordings prove that soundwise this works well - but I'd love to play the real thing (after all, that's what I got it for) Jack and Mick, you are the Bass players here, I doubt you wouldn't know how to best plug in the instrument... do you use the same device and software? Sorry, I didn't realize that you had an actual bass guitar. If I had a bass I'd use it. that's far superior to emulating a bass with my guitar. Look into the free bass amp modeling software first. I'm sure there's something out there. The free version of Amplitube might even have something. If not try going through the NI stuff that you already have and see what happens.
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Post by bluesbruce on Feb 26, 2015 8:12:43 GMT -6
Wow, Tony, I think that sounds pretty cool. First off, I love Return To Forever and haven't heard "500 Miles High" in ages, so it was good to hear that choice of song. I thought your tone sounded good. Guitar could have been more prominent in your mix, but that kind of stuff is always personal preference. I thought your arpeggios and chord scales sounded really smooth. Tony, BIAB does take some "practice" to get good results with it - you've got to learn some of it's tricks - use of styles, resting instruments, holds & shots, etc. What version of BIAB do you have?
Bruce
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Post by cunningr on Feb 26, 2015 11:14:46 GMT -6
T that was excellent listening, I gave it a heart.
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Post by Phil on Feb 28, 2015 12:08:58 GMT -6
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Post by Phil on Feb 28, 2015 14:16:05 GMT -6
No?!? Than it must even be worse than I thought it to be... thanks a lot for the YT links, gotta check them out! EDIT: Phil, I just listened to what I did there yesterday myself... hoping you were the only one who listened to this, I just put the link down. Not sure what came over me, that was kind of embarassing I thought that maybe you were experimenting with some sort of far eastern alternate tuning.
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Post by blackcountrymick on Mar 5, 2015 10:59:25 GMT -6
I think being able to play what you hear in your head (or someone else play) is the nirvana that most musicians strive for, something even at my late years I would love to be able to achieve. I believe that you are certainly on the right track by developing your improvisation skills, put that together with some tried and tested anchor or signature licks and phrases to come back to when you lose your way and you will be able to wail away for hours. I know its not quite that simple but we all got to start somewhere. I've always been a copier so I probably have more work to do than most to achieve this fretboard freedom . EDIT : I forgot to mention that a lot of music teachers preach the importance of recording yourself. so that's another box ticked then
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Post by Phil on Mar 6, 2015 5:16:21 GMT -6
T-Bone, here's an overly long response to your post regarding licks vs playing scales. I decided to put it here because the other thread is getting long. I think you may have a misunderstanding of my position on licks verses noodling around on scales. I'm simply saying that I, me personally, have to be careful that I don't end up noodling around for hours on end, never accomplishing anything, and call it practice. During the past year I've made more progress than I have in my life by staying focused on one course of instruction and having a structured practice schedule. However, what you are doing does have value, especially trying to improvise over backing tracks. Improvising over backing tracks (which is something I have never done) is an excellent way to train your ear to hear the chord changes and to use the appropriate notes over the chords. This is actually something that I need to start doing, but I need to allot a specific amount of time to it after I've done more structured practice. I know that Jack has mentioned that he does it quite often. So, I just want to make it clear that I'm not against doing it. In fact I now see that it is an important thing to do. It just can't be the only thing you do. Here's my take on learning licks. IMO I think there is a real misconception of what improvisation is. Skilled improvisors don't just pull notes out of their asses. Look at it this way - when you have a conversation with someone you are improvising, as opposed to making a speech that you spent hours composing. In a converstion you put words together on the fly. You may put them together in a certain way at just the right moment and say something witty or profound. You might whisper or shout. You might emphasize a word or slur others together. You might put together a beautiful complete sentence or short choppy fragments. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you already know the words and you know the grammatical structure to place them into. You put words together in a way that is coherent and makes sense. What you do not do is noodle around the alphabet, make up words, and just string them together willy-nilly. If you did you wouldn't make sense and you wouldn't be understood. So, IMHO, I think that skilled improvisors play things they already know and have practiced. However, they are putting these things together on the fly, in the appropriate place and at the right time so that they make a coherent and sensible musical statement. When I talk about the importance of learning licks I guess I should first give my definition of what a lick is to me. To me a lick doesn't have to be a 2, 3, or 4 bar complete musical sentence. It could be a just 3 notes played a certain way. For example, the 'bend-release-pull off' that appears so frequently throughout BYCU is a lick to me. Bending the 4th scale degree to the 5th and playing the 5th again on the next higher string is also a lick. These are the little words that you put together into interesting sounding phrases and the phrases into sentences. Licks have to be practiced to have them at your finger tips when needed. If all you practice is scales, then all you are going to be able to play is scales when you try to improvise or even when you try to compose something of your own. Just go to any Blues forum where people upload examples of themselves playing their own stuff over a backing track. Most of them are just running up, down and around the pentatonic minor scale. There is no hook. There is no musical meaning. They are not being coherent. The ones who sound good and professional are the ones who play well thought out phrases or licks. Regarding the 2 choruses I added to "Jumpin' Blues" - if you compare the 2 choruses you'll see that they are very very much the same. In fact, they both consist just a couple of licks repeated in different octaves or with slight variations. I didn't do that intentionally, but it's the way it turned out. In fact, I didn't even realize I was using the same things over and over until I finished. Also, for the 1st time ever, I pretty much had everything worked out in my head and then worked it out on the guitar. I actually came up with some ideas that I couldn't even play and had to simplify things. By simplifying things I probably also improved them and the made the whole thing less cluttered. I was really concerned that it would come out sounding very amateurish, but I was pretty happy with the result of this 1st attempt at coming up with something of my own. This is something I'm going to try to do more often. Like anything else, I think the more you do it the better you'll get. So, to sum it up - I think that noodling around over a backing track is an important part of the learning process, especially in training your ear. It is definitely something I need to start doing. However, I also firmly believe that licks (according to my definition) are the vocabulary that we need to make interesting and coherent musical statements. I hope you are still awake. Phil
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Post by Phil on Mar 6, 2015 8:20:35 GMT -6
Hey Phil, thank you very much to honor my rather lenghty post with this extensive answer. If we keep this up we're going to bore everyone to death or distract them from valuable practice time. Sometimes writing can be very cathartic.
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Post by cunningr on Mar 10, 2015 12:27:05 GMT -6
That was pretty good tony I added a heart.
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Post by blackcountrymick on Mar 10, 2015 18:24:21 GMT -6
OK Tony, now you've gone and made me buy yet another book!!!! Improvisation has been a hot topic of late and I can see the importance of developing those skills but it has always been a case of I will get into that when I get more skilled in the mechanics of playing. Well, how can I jam with you guys if I can't improvise . I sort of noodle over backing tracks and string a few learned licks together but that is my limit so I have ordered a book on chord tone soloing to give me a structure to practice and learn from. I enjoyed listened to your improv post and others that have been posted recently and it has given me the kick start I need. Thanks guys.
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