I’m in the middle of doing what’s often referred to as a ‘remote session’ – an artist or producer sends a MP3 of a master track to a musician to get that musician to record their parts in their home studio. They then send high res WAV or AIFF files back via FTP or burnt to CD in the post, and everyone’s happy. The benefits of this system are obvious – it means that projects that couldn’t afford to either hire big studios or fly musicians around the world are able to get the musicians they really want to play on it, and the musician doesn’t have to leave home, and has access to all their favourite gear, records into their program of choice and can spend some time experimenting in a way that would probably scare the producer if they were to do it in a studio.
This project (the LeeSun session I referred to here yesterday) is a particularly fun one because I get to play ‘bass’ bass and then do all the other StevieStuff on top – I REALLY enjoy playing normal bass, and am rather good at it, and these days I don’t get asked all that often to play normal bass (this coming month I’ve got a fair bit of it, what with playing with Sarah Masen and Monk at Greenbelt), so to get to do that stuff and then overdub ebow loveliness and crazy big slide guitar parts, tremolo baritone guitar-esque stuff and fretless melodies is a real joy.
The other recent change in what I’ve been doing work-wise has been house concerts – as mentioned before, these are gigs in people’s living rooms, conservatories, gardens, even garages for lovely audiences of music lovers and supporters of the arts. Sometimes is just a gig, sometimes is a garden party, sometimes it’s a charity thing… Whichever, they are really enjoyable shows, pay much better than trying to play in a pub or most little music clubs and invariably result in a better time for audience and musician. All Good Nothing Bad.
It really is a cottage industry – small-scale, mobile, flexible, personal, enjoyable, creative and all built on relationships between real people for the mutual benefit of all concerned. Like the teaching I’ve been doing for so long, it’s my dream job because I get to meet so many fascinating and wonderful people, play great music, learn loads about music myself from the whole process and somehow in the middle of it all actually pay the bills… I am blessed.
I guess I ought to add at this point, that I’m available for all of the above – playing on records, playing in your house, or teaching you bass… just drop me an email and we’ll get the process started on any of those! :o)
But for now, I’ve got LeeSun’s songs to finish off…