NPR Bass Solo Contest, Part II

Those following the blog and my posts already know that I learned of a NPR bass solo contest just a week before the deadline and right during the French Open (tennis tournament) where I would be working every day and would not have the ability to record at my studio in my in-laws pool house about eighty miles from our apartment.

Only hours after I had posted my last blog Audra and I drove to her parents’ house in Highland during day light hours—normally something we avoid like the plague because of traffic. I packed up nearly all of my gear to bring back home. Miraculously, it fit all into my small car. Fortunately, there was room for Audra.

The trip as it would turn out, was essentially a waste, but we didn’t know that yet.

Sunday evening I spent setting up the studio and testing everything so that Monday when I came home from work I would be able to start recording immediately. The major goal was to keep the noise level at a minimum which is harder than it may seem.

It is necessary at this point to give a primer on guitar tube amplifiers -musicians, guitarists skip ahead.

Over-simply put, when a guitar amp is overdriven (made louder), it no longer recreates an exact copy the sound coming from the guitar pickups. The peaks of the signal waves hit the limits of the tubes and those peaks are sheered off. A smooth, round sine wave goes into the amp, a more jagged, squarish wave comes out. This adds frequencies to the sound that weren’t there originally: distortion.

In most amplified signals distortion is the enemy and must be avoided, but as musicians have discovered in the last sixty or-so years, it can be a very good thing, adding warmth, richness and intensity to the sound of a guitar, bass, organ or even harmonica; especially if you are playing rock or blues.

There are all sorts of devices, and now software, than can create/recreate this desirable distortion at many levels and in many flavors. In general however, the best, most natural sounding distortion comes from over driving a tube amplifier and the only way to get a tube amp to distort significantly is to turn it up… loud!

Since my music contains bass and most often no guitar at all, I have to fill a wider spectrum of sound. A big part of my sound is to split the signal coming from my bass into two amplifiers. One is a modern bass amp to recreate the very low and very high (string slap) sounds of a modern sounding bass. The other is a blues guitar tube amp with more midrange qualities and the ability to create that wonderful tube distortion.

The bass amp and guitar amp sides of  my bass rig respectively

The entire reason my studio is normally set up at the pool house is so I can turn-up loud and get the sound I need. It would be a real pain in the ass for my neighbors if I did this at home, especially the fastidious one in the apartment below me.

These, however, were extenuating circumstances. This contest could really be a milestone for me, not just if I win but if my music gets posted on the blog. Even just the mention of my being posted to the blog in my press kit would be huge to say nothing of the exposure. I had nowhere else I could go and record both audio and video in the small window between getting home from work and sunset. Taking off from work was not an option because of the short notice and the fact that this happened to be the first week of the French Open. Rehearsal studios often have very loud bands a wall away, ok for rehearsal but not recording. There’s no way I could swing the cost a real recording studio and going to a friend’s house would involve travel time and set up that would add pressure and take away precious daylight time or involve lugging in and setting up lighting for the video.

There was really only the one option.

The bass amp side could be recorded direct without sacrificing too much of the amp sound plugging the amp direct out into my laptop. Guitar amps, however, as a rule must be mic'd to prevent a harsh sterile sound.

There are some tricks to getting an amp to sound loud without it being as loud. A dummy load placed in-line with the speakers absorbs the energy the amp puts out decreasing the energy going to the speakers thus making them quieter.

I reasoned that if I dummy-loaded the guitar amp using my two bass speakers, placed the bass speakers face-down on our bed on top of the couch cushions, place the guitar amp up on a step stool with a thick folded furniture blanket in between the stool and the floor and swaddled the guitar amp in yet another furniture blanket. If I turned down the overall volume of the guitar as much as possible and got the song recorded within a half an hour by the time someone complained, I’d be done.  

I should have taken some pictures but I had other fish to fry at the time.

On Monday when I recorded however, I couldn’t get a perfect performance in the thirty minutes I had imposed upon myself. Playing and singing at the same time is still relatively new to me. I keep getting better at it but it’s still a rare thing when I can do both perfectly. I would try again the next day and hope my neighbors would be either absent or understanding.

On Tuesday I still was having trouble performing. The pressures were getting to me and each take was worse than the last. Finally, things seemed to be getting better when it happened. I heard pounding and yelling from the apartment below. I stopped immediately. Audra said she would go talk to the guy, explain the situation and promise this would not be the norm. He wouldn’t even listen and called my building manager who then called me.

I was finished.

Even if I was granted a temporary reprieve my emotions were ragged. If I was having trouble making it through a take before, another time would have been even harder.

Audra and I were both so upset were barely slept that night. We brainstormed solutions but each time, the restrictions of time, money, light and my increasingly frazzled nerves made every option highly impractical if not impossible.

It would be possible to submit an audio only version of the song. The contest specified video or audio was acceptable. However listening only to my tune, it is so different that one could easily assume they are hearing a guitar. It must be seen.

There was only one thing left we could do. I already had a video of the song that I had made strictly to evaluate my performance and share with my friends: you. This was the video I posted in last week’s blog and one time before that.

Originally, I was loathe to use that first video for the contest because my singing had gone off-key for a moment or two and had some slightly weak moments. Also, it was just a single boring wide shot that didn’t illustrate my unusual playing style and technique very well. Now, it was all I had. If I took that video and added some close up shots to it and did some brief vocal overdubs to fix the mistakes, it might be passable. If we shot close enough it wouldn’t be too obvious that those close-ups were shot in a completely different room city and county.

The next evening I quickly fashioned a homemade Steadicam type rig out of part of a lighting stand with a water bottle taped to the bottom and the camera mounted on top. The key principle of a Steadicam is to add mass to a camera and extend its center of gravity away from the film plane so making basic one for a small light camera is quite easy. I gave Audra a crash course on the shots that I wanted and we recorded a single take of close ups of my hands playing. The bass was unamplified and silent while I played along to the old video on my laptop.

A real Steadicam which creates dolly-smooth motion from a walking
operator and costs tens of thousands before even adding a camera.

A steady-rig I built a few years back similar to
the one I threw together this week minus the water bottle

I then placed the camera on the floor and got a take of low close-ups. I gave the illusion of camera movement by moving and positioning myself into different shots.  I edited a new version of the video with the additional footage. This was not easy as I had no time code to sync the shots to. I simply lined them up till they looked right. It took some time but the results were convincing fo the most part. The video was now much better but still, it looked too impersonal. There were no close-ups of me singing. On Thursday evening, I videoed my singing close up. I only had time for one take before I had to deliver Audra to a halfway point where her parents picked her up for a doctors appointment the next day.

Now to return home and do vocal overdubs to fix my mistakes before it got too late.

I turned the key in the ignition but it wouldn’t budge. My car occasionally has this problem but after fiddling around a bit I had always been able to make it work without much trouble.

Not this time.

In the parking lot of a Jack-In-The-Box in Pomona, for half an hour I tried working the key, spraying the lock with WD-40, attempting to loosen the stubborn tumblers with a dental tool I happened to have in my electronics tool kit and yes, pounding the snot out of the damn thing, I gave up and called a first one locksmith, then another. The second guy came and removed the lock from the ignition. He didn’t have a replacement lock but left it so that the key… any key, even a screwdriver or small coin, would start the car. I would have to fix it fully later.

If anyone wants to steal my bare-bones, no frills, 2000 Ford Focus, now’s the time.

Of course it was too late to record any singing when I got home. The next day was the deadline but I would have just enough time to record my overdubs, remix the track which needed more high-end and some other tweaks and submit the video for the contest.

The next day, around two-o-clock, I decided to double check the “Monitormix” blog for any details on the contest I may have missed. I’m glad I did. The deadline was not midnight as I thought it was, it was Five PM Pacific, just three hours away! Fortunately things at Tennis Channel were quiet and I was able to add titles, copyright and contact text to my video, re-render it and upload it with an hour to spare.

The video was not all I’d hoped it would be by a long shot but looking at it now, what’s important, the bass playing, came through nicely and if they can excuse a poor mix and some singing faux pas, I think it will make a great impression. Whether that impression will be enough to get me onto the blog for voting is up to God and the ether.

Overall, I have a good feeling about it. I’m a little wiser through all of this and I was moved and inspired by how my wonderful wife supported me, wouldn’t let be give up when things looked bleak and even went to bat for me to our irate neighbor whose balcony plants may mysteriously wither in the coming weeks (kidding).

Here is the result, the video I submitted for the contest:

I deeply appreciate everyone who supported me and offered help through this.