Brand New EP “Travelling North” – Free Download

Here it is – hit play, then read on while you’re listening (then come back and download it if you like what you hear)

Travelling North EP by solobasssteve

Having been in a bit of a musical black hole for the past few weeks, I’ve finally emerged with something I’m happy with… The combination of living in a small flat and having a baby who has learned to pull himself up to standing on anything and grab at guitar cables meant that my music gear was pretty much packed away for a few weeks.

Then I started playing again – in the evenings, after he’s gone to bed – but had 3 or 4 days of REALLY bad playing. Proper depressing rubbish. Not surprisingly, really, given the time I had off and the difficulty of playing chordal music on a 6 string fretless bass!

Anyway, last night, I decided to focus on recording some new music – hitting ‘record’ is one of the best ways I know of focussing my mind on playing something of value. And it worked.

I played two pieces – the first recorded was ‘Nothing Can Prepare’ – having played a couple of my older tunes, this was the first bit of new music I played. Yay!

Next up was a ‘Travelling North’ – wanted to play something on the fretted 6, largely because I hadn’t recorded it since changing the strings about a week ago (still Bass Centre Elites, just switched to a slightly lighter gauge). It sounded amazing, but I realised I hadn’t hit record. Doh! So re-recorded the same idea, and that’s what’s here.

Recording wise, I’m using my bass, into my Lexicon MPX-G2 processor, into the MOTU Ultralite soundcard, which sends back out to the Looperlative LP1 which handles all the looping, and is recorded back on three separate channels (despite being a stereo unit, my Looperlative is still looping in mono, thanks to a schoolboy error from me a year or so ago where I blew one side of the signal path…)

There you have it. Enjoy! Please feel free to share it around, to embed it anywhere... if you paste the URL of the tracks into Facebook, it automatically generates a player so people on facebook can listen to it there.

The plan now is to record a couple more tracks, remaster these (the mix/master on these was done fairly quick – it’s good, but I’ll polish it a little 🙂 ) and then put it up on Bandcamp as a proper EP. So grab them here while you can!