Having had the aforementioned week away from playing, I sat down yesterday to do some bass-things. I started out on my fretted 6 string bass, and couldn’t really find anything that was particularly interesting to me (though that may feel very different when I go back to watch the video!), but once I switched to the fretless, things got a lot more fun.
This first video is actually the second one I recorded yesterday, and starts out pretty spacey and mellow. There a big healthy dose of fretless melody stuff in the middle – just exploring the emotional landscape of the underlying loops (which are three overlapping loops of different lengths, so the texture keeps shifting, along with the subtle changes in the harmony as the different parts of the three loops coincide to form new chords).
Then I switch to slide, with another shorter loop with the feedback turned down so it’s basically a long delay, and play around with the wah-wah/filter on the sound to give depth to the layers… The sound on the video is OK, but not really good enough to hear just how effective this can be. Still, you get a good impression of what’s going on.
here it is, enjoy!
Steve Lawson – New Ambient Work, Beta version… from Steve Lawson on Vimeo.
If you want to see more of what I’ve been up to, there are lots of videos from the last month or so of experimentation at vimeo.com/solobasssteve.
And of course, Youtube has loads of live video of me solo and with Lobelia, Theo Travis, Michael Manring etc.