Upright Bass tutorial midis?

[beboop]

first let me say the Upright Bass is amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Any chance we could get some brief tutorial midis? Say, a chorus of rockabilly slap, a jazz ballad, a medium swing walk.

My feeble keyboard chops are inadequate to get the most out of the Upright Bass. What I have to do is piano-roll edit a rudimentary bass line, adding and tweaking articulations.

Having a few good midis to study would be very helpful toward learning to apply the rakes, slaps and slides etc.

[Gregjazz]

Good idea!

My feeble keyboard chops are inadequate to get the most out of the Upright Bass. What I have to do is piano-roll edit a rudimentary bass line, adding and tweaking articulations.

Sometimes what I do is record the bassline through the keyboard, playing using just the basic sustained range, and then go into the piano roll and quantize, add FX, etc.

[manytone]

We are opening up www.manybass.com soon and this site will feature tutorials etc. I am sure we will have something there for UBK also. I do know Greg has worked on some tutorials for it already. Perhaps we can have something tutorial wise there eventually for the Upright Bass too.

Hang in there, as we are going to have some great stuff at manybass.com

Paul

[annode]

I've played a bit of UB in my past.
There is a plucking style you can usually find in a bass walk called "double stopping".
Besides slides,that is the most important,distinctive accent in an emulated UB walk.

It's just an accent...a dead/muted string pluck or thumb slap that will break up a 1/4 note into 2x 8th notes.
Like;
- 1,2,3,4,[DS,1],2,3,4
The stopping accent can go anywhere in the count...it's jazz.

I'm thinking that if you have a DS sound sample, you could paste it into a bass audio track...or if midi,create a second midi track playing just the DS sample where you want it heard. Then change the bass midi track accented notes to 8th notes so the DS sample hits right before it.

Just some thoughts.

A great example of the double stop is Donald Fagan's - "Night Fly" - "Walk Between the Raindrops". Killer B3 organ bass.

EDIT: I just heard the manytone audio demo #2.
You have gotten it down man! Sounds great too.

[Gregjazz]

Great advice, Annode. Yup, I sampled those DS sounds you're talking about (called "rakes" in the mapping spec, I think). They're an essential part of walking bass. ManyBass also has those sampled in its electric bass sets.

[annode]

Hi Greg.

It was the '70's where I heard the term double stopping for a particular upright bass plucking technique.
Now,I seached around google to be sure it's what I thought it was. Strangely though there is another definition for it.
Basically to play two fretted notes simultaneously. Nowhere did it say both strings were plucked at once...so i'm going to go for it and say that the double stop for all stringed instruments that aren't being bowed,happens when you actually pluck a single interval.
The 1st note of the interval is a muted note or some other sounded note,of no more then a fraction in time of the next note.

Raking the strings is more commonly heard with solo guitars...but with a bass it's commonly heard as 3 quickly played decending notes maybe 32nd notes in a 4/4 sig.
Like;
- 1,2,3,[3,2,1],4 - I heard two rakes in manytones demo#2.

Manytone defines stacato rakes more closely to my double stop...but doesn't appear to have any technique metioned that actually describes the raking as I define it.

I am either wrong..(nah)...or manytone may want to update.

Just my take on it.

[Gregjazz]

The reason I called it a rake, besides not knowing any official term for that bassism (has that ever been sampled before in any other bass library?), is because of the general technique employed (at least on electric bass) to produce that stacatto open string. For example, if I'm walking on the D string, I insert those stacatto notes by the rake technique, which is letting your finger continue to play the string below (pitchwise, so that'd be the A string), following up from a rest stroke.

Jaco and Rocco Prestia both incorperate the rake technique in other methods of bassline creation.

Of course, there are exceptions, such as you generally execute the stacatto note with your index finger (or at least I do), so if you've just plucked the string that you're walking on with your middle finger, it's not a rake technique at all.

But yes, I've always heard the term double-stop, even on electric and upright bass, to mean the technique of playing two notes at the same time.

[beboop]

I've always heard the term double-stop, even on electric and upright bass, to mean the technique of playing two notes at the same time.

yeah, and guitar, violin -- double-stop is a term used with with string instruments in general, "stop" as in "limit the vibrating length as necessary to play the desired pitch" and "double" as in, well, two of 'em at the same time.

I think the rule is, double-stop has an Official Meaning because classical players do it. Things that classical players don't do, or don't have a name for, you get to make up your own

A web page with tutorials, sounds great! When I said "tutorials" I was really just thinking some .mid demos in a few styles, demonstrating the stuff idiomatic to a style so we could look at it in a piano-roll or event list and glean some
sequencing tips. Full blown tutorials, that's even better.

[Gregjazz]

We're talking not only written tutorials, but also videos that you can watch and learn sequencing tricks, etc.