Much like saying that a DJ is NOT a "musician" and that "singers" who rely on auto-tune should be ran out of the village by a mob with torches and pitchforks to be forever shunned for their lack of musicianship and integrity, this blog will likely get under some folks' skin and I will be accused of "gatekeeping" or something. But fuck it. Call me what you will, but what you CAN'T call me is a "liar"...
Ever since just before the Revelator trainwreck imploded several years back, I've been focusing a lot of my original songwriting and performing energy on a "power-duo" format. In fact, the spark of interest of doing a power-duo came from that failed project, when I found myself having to come up with an interesting and plausible means of covering for our bassist at some live performances due to some scheduling issues--we didn't want to cancel the shows, and I really didn't want to have do them as acoustic shows, because I prefer playing electric. So I got to thinking about a few of the songs that had simpler bass guitar parts, and started coming up with ways that I could fake the bass guitar part along with what I'm playing on guitar.
I started doing some deep diving on bands that only had two members (a guitar player and a drummer), like Local H, The White Stripes, the flat Duo Jets and a couple others. But then I also had recently been turned on to the British group Royal Blood, featuring a bass player and drummer. In comparing Local H and Royal Blood, the formula is basically the same, except the instruments are reversed. In Local H, Scott Lucas uses a separate pickup mounted just underneath his lowest two or three strings and he runs a separate signal out to a different pedal board or whatever and into a bass rig, while still having the regular guitar pickup going to his guitar pedal board and into his guitar rig. I'm still not entirely sure if he uses some sort of octave effect to create a bass note, or if he just turns the bass frequencies up on the amp EQ, but in my head, I was thinking to myself that if I can somehow drop that signal an octave so that it's a legitimate bass note, it would sound pretty authentic. Even listening to some of the live performances by Local H, I can't quite figure out if he's actually doing a low octave on his bass, but that's the special sauce that I was going for. Royal Blood did the same thing, except for basically the guy just runs a stereo signal into two different setups, and he uses some effects that can not only create the octave higher, but in some cases also a fifth, so that it creates a power chord sound, and he runs that side into a guitar rig, while running his standard bass guitar signal into a bass rig. I also through a little bit of consideration in there for the Presidents of the United States of America, because between the two of them (Chris Ballew and whichever other guitarist was in the band at any given time), there are only five strings on the guitars in the entire band, one guy has two and the other has three, but aside from the higher octave third string, they're playing the same octave even, and they managed to make it sound huge. So I had a lot to consider and work with.
After I determined what songs we could still do if I could pull it off, I started getting into the mad scientist part of it. The first one I built was kind of roughly based on the Stratocaster that Scott Lucas plays sometimes with Local H, which had half of a Fender Precision Bass pick up mounted at an angle under the lower strings, ran to a separate jack (I would later refine this to a TRS cable, with the "tip" going from the guitar pickup to the guitar rig and the "ring" from the "bass" pickup to a bass rig thanks to a splitter I made in a pedal enclosure). The first setup I used for this purpose, I used a cheap little processor that I would set to a pitch shifting effect to get my low octave for my bass guitar sound, and then I would just run the guitar portion into a standard amp (later I moved to two dedicated small pedalboards with guitar and bass uses, respectively). It worked spectacularly, and we did a number of shows where nobody really gave any thought to the fact that we didn't have a bass player on stage with us. There were even a couple of bass guitarists in the audience at most of the shows, and they couldn't believe how decent it sounded. So we had our fix for when our bass player was out of town. And thus, the seed for me using the setup for my own music and performing was planted, fertilized and starting to sprout. It didn't sit well with Revelator's self-proclaimed "leader", and I believe that was one of the things that actually ended that project shortly thereafter...because, after all, he was allowed to collaborate and have several vanity projects going on at any given time, but Heaven forbid the rest of us do the same. Digressing...
To make it work and still sound like a full band, you have to abandon complex basslines and counter-melodies on guitar for the most part, and forget about any outrageous flashy guitar heroics, because you have to keep everything together since both guitar and bass are coming out of one instrument, but if you write songs or pick and choose covers that have no guitar solos or that something can be done in place of the guitar solo, or in those instances where, for example, I can pedal an open E or A string and play a solo on the other strings, and it works. Surprisingly well, actually. In my early days with Idle Minds in the early-to-mid '90s, our longest-serving bass player could play a root note and a couple of accents here and there but did not really know the fundamentals of bass guitar, and kept it largely very, very basic. Hell, even other working bands I gig with in most cases the bassist is not the most technically proficient bass player out there either. So again, expectations are low in that regard from both audiences and even with other musicians. With one or two exceptions, I've spent a lifetime trying to compensate for bass players who were just playing it safe and simple, so how was this any different? I would just dumb down the bass parts and simplify some of the guitar playing, or change some chord shapes or whatever, and basically, I just became literally almost every milquetoast bass and rhythm guitar player around here, but still better in some cases, and on one instrument to boot---so this never has, nor will it ever, just sound like "a guitar and drums but no bass". And doing a few little tricks here and there to show that I've got a little bit of a command of not just the instrument but also of the songs themselves definitely makes me stand out a little bit without looking like I'm trying to show off too much. Sometimes just being solid, consistent and relentless is the best way to "show off" anyway. But "what's the point?", you might be asking.
I recently did a less-than-gratifying covers gig with my duo in a bar I play with another group (believe it or not, we've managed to come up with 4 hours of covers that sound pretty amazing as a two-piece), and I think a lot of why it didn't go as great as it could've was a mix of the regular-ol'-dive-bar-bullshit mentality and some folks confused by the format. I think we got some weird looks because there was just two of us and people were expecting something maybe lower-key, "chill" and did NOT expect us to sound like a full band ; that was literally one of the "complaints" from the bar manager: "loud as a full band"---I mean, thank you and all, but that's a problem WHY??? Did they WANT only the sparse, incomplete lo-fi sound of just a guitar, drums and vocals? I think that fucked with people, but I'm still not sure "why". I went into the gig thinking the average bar crowd wouldn't care about such things---after all, we were doing a handful of songs I've played in that very same bar with another group that always go over great, AND this is the same kind of audience who doesn't understand the ingredients to a band, or why asking a power-trio to play Chicago or Lynyrd Skynyrd songs (requiring keyboards, horns, multiple guitars, etc.) is kind of silly and inappropriate. So surely they'd appreciate two guys pulling off some familiar covers and sounding as good as (or better than) they typical shitty Friday night cover-band they're used to seeing. But for whatever reason, I believe this particular crowd had some preconceived notion that we would sound different, quieter or something. Okay, the night sucked, to be perfectly frank, from a double-booking debacle we encountered while setting up to the very last note. Even when we did some absolutely killer versions of some songs (especially in the second set, where we put our "A"-list stuff and after the mix was dialed-in), aside from a pocket of folks over at one table and a few dudes across the bar at another table, people were unresponsive. Uncomfortable silence. This was also the same venue that hosted acoustic duos and even a corny-as-FUCK duo featuring a literal karaoke singer, a dude with a guitar and a goddamned LAPTOP playing---no shit---PURCHASED BACKING TRACKS (not even backing tracks they recorded themselves). Yes, this venue let some act with a laptop that you would be mortified to host in your fucking living room for a New Year's party play there---and they were regular performers there---yet you put a competent guitarist/vocalist and drummer in there doing organic, fully-LIVE music and people act like we were violating some kind of sacred taboo. We even tried to keep the overall volume down in the first set (even had to be asked to turn the PA up a little, instead of down), but there was seemingly no way of pleasing this crowd.
No comments:
Post a Comment