Tag: bass

New Music Tuesday XXIV: “Weird Doll”

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While I was looking for an image to accompany “Lazy Sunday CDV: Music Lessons” I found the manuscript for an old piece called “Weird Doll.” As far as I can tell, I never did anything with this piece, so I decided to slap it together yesterday morning. I based the doodle on this creepy old doll my Mom had growing up, which is made out of some kind of strange rubberish polymer. It was so creepy.

Indeed, it was two dolls: a boy and a girl. I’ve depicted the boy in the doodle seen in the video below. The doll had these weirdly articulated eyebrows that were made from the same sculpted polymer as the rest of it.

As far as the mixing and such, I just added a “Ambient” reverb effect and turned the “room size” down from 100 to about 75 in Audacity, then a “Firm Bass” preset that I turned all the way up. I also applied a “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect.

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Lazy Sunday CDII: Chapel Stuff

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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

Open Mic Adventures CLXVI: “Softly and Tenderly”

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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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New Music Tuesday XX: “Chorale for Single Reeds”

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Sunday morning I jotted down another chorale—I’ve been on a chorale kick lately—and decided to experiment with 9/4 time. I really just wanted to see how composing for longer measures might affect the final product. I did find that my “grammar” changed a bit while composing in this unorthodox time signature, with more subdivisions of three popping up.

I exported the WAV from Noteflight and imported it into Audacity. There I applied a “Large Room” reverb filter; a “Wide Synth Pad” chorus effect; and a “Lush High-Ends” master effect.

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Open Mic Adventures CLVI: “March of the Goliath Beetles”

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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.

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Phone it in Friday XCVII: YouTube Roundup LCVII: Roll Trilogy

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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!

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Open Mic Adventures CXXXIII: “Skiddle-Diddle-Diddle-Dee (Dit-Dit-Dit)”

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Apparently, I failed to make videos for all of the pieces on Leftovers IV.  Indeed, I neglected to upload a lot of the goodies that I usually include with digital purchases of albums; that has now been rectified.

So I am back to looking at some tracks from that short EP.  This week’s has the most ridiculous title of any piece I’ve ever composed:  “Skiddle-Diddle-Diddle-Dee (Dit-Dit-Dit)”:

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Open Mic Adventures CIV: “Heavy Metal Mummy”

The Portly Politico8 Comments

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.

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