It’s been a Chapel-filled week here on the blog, so I’m dashing off this quick Lazy Sunday before dashing off to play bass at church:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
I was working on an alto saxophone arrangement of the hymn “Softly and Tenderly” by Will L. Thompson last week, as I am planning on playing it for Chapel this week at school. I’ve always liked the hymn, and I recently attempted it on sax for a Sunday night singing at my old church. While playing it, I realized I was unclear one some of the notes in the melody, so there was a chunk where I was kind of adlibbing my way through.
That being the case, I thought it would be worthwhile to have a version for alto sax as sheet music. This arrangement is really more of a transcription; that is, I attempted to put on paper what I play when I am noodling the hymn on sax. I tried to replicate the various ornamentations that I add on when I play.
Once I had the transcription I wanted, I didn’t grab my alto sax right away. Instead, I grabbed my bass! I played bass with our new church’s praise band for the first time this past Sunday, and I needed to practice some of the pieces for service. Since I had the bass out anyway, I decided to play the alto sax arrangement on the bass!
The result is the feature of today’s post. The typical key for “Softly and Tenderly” is concert Ab major. That puts it in the key of F major for an alto saxophone (for transposing reasons I won’t explain here, because while I think it’s cool, it’s also kind of tedious and boring). So, by playing on the bass (which I think of a concert-pitch instrument, but which technically transposes everything down one octave), I was shifting the key to concert F major (meaning if I played it with a pianist, the pianist would have to play in F major, not Ab major).
See? Kind of tedious. The bass rendition, however, is not:
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Today’s piece, “Drink the Rum,” is a track with an unusual provenance. Dr. Wife and I were on a tour in Belize City on Wednesday, 15 July 2026. The tour guide, Omar, took out a bent cheese grater and a spoon to demonstrate how Belizeans make music out of anything. He played a rhythm on his grater and sang “Drink the rum!”
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I have a lot of great bass guitarists in my Music Ensemble classes, and I have always wanted to experiment with an electric bass ensemble—a small chamber group consisting entirely of electric basses. I think it can be done (and probably has been done, if I took three seconds to Google it).
The challenge with basses is that those low tones can get awfully muddy, so composing for multiples of the instrument requires exploring the full breadth of the fret board.
Today’s piece, which I deem to be incomplete (although it does have a satisfying conclusion), is one such attempt at blending three basses into one. I have yet to try this piece with my three High School Music Ensemble bassists, but I have worked individual parts with them with me playing one of the other parts. I’m excited to see how and if the three will blend in Reality as well as they do in digital form.
I’m still waiting to hear from CD Baby that they’ve approved my latest release, Spooky Season IV. They have gotten super slow with approving albums now that they’re charging extra for fast-tracked approval. Boooooooooooooo!
Regardless, here’s another track from the upcoming-at-some-point album:
Over the course of the last two years I’ve composed a ton of music. I treat composing the way the Native Americans treated the mighty bison: I don’t waste anything. That means I probably release a lot of “filler” tunes, but I find that pieces I think of as throwaways compositions are sometimes the most popular.
I do not know if the pieces shared today fall into that category. But for whatever reason, I like writing pieces with “Roll” in title. These are always based, in part, on food.
The first of these was “Orange Roll,” an odd little piece in 5/4 time. The “Orange” comes from the fact I used an orange pen to compose it; the “Roll” came from the rolling feel of the melody.
Later, I wrote “Tomato Roll,” a clarinet duet in 5/8 time. I wrote the piece mainly because I spent way too much time drawing a detailed tomato in MS Paint as a way to illustrate a concept to my Economics students during a couple of days of online learning.
Finally, I recently composed “Crunchy Roll,” which is a bass guitar in 3/4 and 4/4, but with lots of odd timing.
But enough of my yakkin’—let’s boogie!
Yours portly is on his way back from a family trip to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, where I very likely rode The Mummy, an exceptional indoor rollercoaster based on the 1999 film of the same name.
As such, it seemed appropriate to feature the first track from Spooky Season III, “Heavy Metal Mummy“; it’s a really fun jam to kick off the album, and I particularly love the spaghetti Western vibe it has, especially in the B section of the piece.
Pickup my newest release: Spooky Season III! Use promo code spooky to take an additional 20% off all purchases on Bandcamp! Code expires at 11:59 PM UTC on Thursday, 31 October 2024.
It’s been a busy week for yours portly, as it’s been Homecoming Week at my school. So I’m going to keep things short today and offer a couple of YouTube Shorts. One features Murphy being cute; the other features yours portly smacking the bass:
As I wrote this morning, my latest album, 🎸Advanced Funkification🎸, is out now on Bandcamp and various streaming platforms. I figured it would be worthwhile to compile the various links into one list for your convenience. I’m really proud of this release, and I think it deserves to be heard—and I think y’all will enjoy it!
Here is the current list of websites/platforms/services where you can listen to the release:
For YouTube users, here’s the full playlist:
Get funky!
—TPP
Okay, admittedly, this week’s edition of Open Mic Adventures is a bit of a cop-out. Actually, a pretty big one: it’s the same song as last week’s installment, but on BASS!
