A quiet piece using Ubass and baritone ukulele

Kimosabe

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A quiet piece, no screaming guitars, no words, no insistent pounding beat, just me, my Pono chambered electric baritone, and my Hadean acoustic Ubass.

Love We Don't Know Your Name (Harley in the Garden)

(Jorgensen)


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y8heNGANjsSmQwxqQ8kU1xkoqKNWN-Ed/view?usp=sharing

I believe you might have to download it. It is less than three minutes. I link it to Google Drive which is free and wherein I store music and documents and from which I send things to others.
 
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Very nice! :shaka:
 
Nice Kim. I'm curious about your recording procedure, what equipment did you use, what app, how you setup the stereo effect?


This is Michael Kohan in Los Angeles, Beverly Grove near the Beverly Center
9 tenor cutaway ukes, 4 acoustic bass ukes, 12 solid body bass ukes, 14 mini electric bass guitars (Total: 39)

• Donate to The Ukulele Kids Club, they provide ukuleles to children in hospital music therapy programs. www.theukc.org
• Member The CC Strummers: YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CCStrummers/video, Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheCCStrummers
 
My pleasure to respond to you, Mike, because we all learn so much from you and your recommendations.

I would say that I work very simply. I use Garage Band on my nine or ten year old MacBook. I interface using a relatively inexpensive Apogee I-rig which requires no drivers, just plug the USB from the I-rig into the computer and your instrument cable from your instrument into the I-rig. Then the stereo effect is just my panning of the instruments.

To record my little piece I used maybe eight tracks. I’m on my IPad so I can’t see. This time I used a metronome and recorded my initial melodic phrase on my bass using a preset setting for the bass that I like called Combo or something like that. I’m not one who likes to fiddle around adjusting all the settings. I want to get my ideas down before I forget them and the presets were designed by sound engineers, of whom I am not one.

Then I figured out how to play my bass phrase on my baritone and more or less copied it on another track. I may not have copied it precisely but hey that’s counterpoint. I have a Pono chambered electric baritone that I love. I think I got a good deal from the Ukulele Site by buying a blemished one. That saved me the job of having to blemish one on my own. I forgot to say that on both tracks I had repeated that initial phrase. I play basically by ear. I know some music theory but try to ignore it when composing. So, I can’t tell you what key the piece is in. My fingers however do find places on the neck they like. A well-trained musician said I was using parallelisms and I thanked her for letting me know what I’m doing. I was also made aware that there is an Asian influence. I guess that’s what happens after living two years in Tokyo and seven years in Honolulu.

After recording those two tracks I tried to find a phrase that I think nicely followed. Garage Band has a nice feature that I’ve learned to use by experimenting. You can get a section to repeat by highlighting it. It repeats over and over.
So, I was able to listen to my previous two tracks while at the same time having space after them on another track to try different possibilities and to record them. When I found one I kept the recording and attempted to play the same thing on another track using a different instrument. I alternated between bass and baritone.

After recording several phrases I wondered what adding a few chords might sound like and again I experimented. Basically following this method I finished my piece and was happy.

Now my advice is to take advantage of all the wonderful and not so wonderful tutorials on YouTube about how to use Garage Band. There’s a lot to learn. It’s kind of like our brains. We only use 10% and many people even less.

Also, in my case, I’ve started to write down what I play using tablature and standard notation because it might be nice to actually be able to play the piece again, some day, or to teach it to someone. I’m okay with standard notation but not with getting the precise timing of the notes.

And, I will say it again, I love Chord Tones Lessons for bass and am learning a lot. After I have practiced diligently for an hour or two I find myself coming up with musical ideas such as those in the piece I presented. Lyle Ritz said practice, practice and then afterwards give yourself time to noodle.

p.s. Initially it was a pain in the okole to get my instruments recording on GB. I had to learn to use the Macbook’s Preferences to get to the computer accept the instruments and to play it out from headphones and also that after doing this I had to deal with GB’s preferences. Now it’s very easy and I don’t have to practice my swearing. Also it’s easy to accidentally get a section of a track repeating on GB and to think your computer is stuck and about to blowup. Now that too is all easy to deal with.
 
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Thank you and very interesting Kim, more intricate than I was expecting. I use GarageBand to record my bass tracks to the leader's uke/singing that she records during our Zoom sessions. I haven't delved into the other functions of GB yet. I have a small Sarahmonic mini mixer into which I plug the 1/4" bass cable via a 1/4" to 3.5mm adapter, then the 3.5mm mixer cable goes to a 3.5mm A/B switch, 'A' goes to my external speaker system (with sub-woofer) connected to the computer headset port so I don't have to use a headset when I practice, 'B' goes from a 3.5mm to a USB adapter specifically for GarageBand recording so I can hear the bass with a bluetooth headset, or without using 'monitor' in GarageBand.

When we were all rehearsing together, I'd record each song on my iPad Pro. I put them, and now the Zoom tracks, on my web site so everyone can practice anytime they want as if we're all together. You clarified for me using the pan with separate tracks to create the stereo effect, thanks.

After playing bass uke with my group for over 6 years, and taking lessons from Denny Croy at McCabe's Guitar Shop, I feel I'm playing reasonably well, though most of the time by patterns and a little by ear. I don't know music, and a don't compose, I'm very happy and content creating the bass arrangements for all the different songs the leader of my group chooses, Cali Rose, her husband is Craig Brandau (who had to stop playing after fracturing his wrist).

Here's a song Cali wrote, to which I just added the bass track.
http://www.kohanmike.com/CCMusic/Smile,%20Smile,%20Smile.mp3

Here's my setup.

Sarahmonic setup 1024.jpg
 
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Couldn’t open your attached Cali song, but I had lunch with Craig and Cali once a number of years ago when they were here for the Waikiki Ukulele Festival. Craig was impressed that I could play Here’s That Rainy Day which I learned from his absolutely fantastic chord soloing book. Good people.
 
Couldn’t open your attached Cali song, but I had lunch with Craig and Cali once a number of years ago when they were here for the Waikiki Ukulele Festival. Craig was impressed that I could play Here’s That Rainy Day which I learned from his absolutely fantastic chord soloing book. Good people.

Nice, I'll mention it to Cali. The link is fixed, I had the wrong URL.
 
Very nice playing. Got my feet moving, which is what a bass player should make you do, dance. Nice to hear the bass up like that also. My compliments to Cali. I didn’t know the song but it definitely sounds like a standard. Thanks.
 
Your bass playing on that song does indeed make me smile and that is what the song is all about. Great.
 
Very nice playing. Got my feet moving, which is what a bass player should make you do, dance. Nice to hear the bass up like that also. My compliments to Cali. I didn’t know the song but it definitely sounds like a standard. Thanks.

That's exactly what I told her when I first heard it. With just her uke and voice and not the other 30-40 members playing along, I figured it would be good to enhance the bass.

Your bass playing on that song does indeed make me smile and that is what the song is all about. Great.

Thank you. I told her we've been corresponding, she replied, "Really nice couple we met in Honolulu. They took us to the coolest local restaurant for dinner after the Hawai’i Ukulele Festival. Small world."
 
Mike,

I’ve got a request: For those of us who live a little too far from McCabe’s to benefit from Denny Croy’s lessons, could you start a thread about some of the patterns that Denny taught you? They certainly work well your accompanying Cali on her wonderful song Smile? Has she done a video of that one? She should. It’s a classic.
 
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Denny gives lessons online in Zoom, I did one with him about a month ago. https://www.mccabes.com/private-lessons/#Bass. Most times he shows me patterns for specific songs we're doing in the group, and also walk ups and downs for major and minor chords, which I use when I make my own abass arrangments to the songs.

Cali has a bunch of videos on YouTube, including Smile on Zoom, but before I added the bass track. Just search Cali Rose ukulele, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cali+rose+ukulele
 
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