Bass in the Place!

I've been working on this album for about 6 months, maybe longer? Working over 65 hours a week at my day job, I only have a little time each evening (if I find ANY) to work on things. I'm also the caretaker of my 44 year old sister, whom suffers from a debilitating condition that won't allow her to work. So time can be tricky to say the least.

I basically started out working on everything myself, including creating midi drum tracks for each song. That quickly got old, as it was very time consuming. I loved getting the results, but even then they didn't quite sound as good as a real drummer. After a few months of that I found some websites that sell pre-recorded drum tracks of all sorts. After trying a few of them out I found myself working a lot quicker on songs. Having drums already made really helped me focus more on EVERYTHING else, so I'm glad I found them.

The song writing process at that point was simply find a drum track that I'm "feeling", and start playing different instruments on it. It's similar to opening "jamming" with a musician in a way. I found it to be much easier to pick and work with the drums first, than to try to write a song or melody and try to find a drum track that fits it. Just some advice for those interested in using drum loops!

So that's what I did, and basically recorded everything to finish up the 'demoes' and now I'm starting the process of recording the final tracks. Obviously the drums were first (being pre-recorded), and I just arranged them accordingly ensuring there weren't any issues. Next up was recording bass.

I have several different preamps, but only two bass preamps and neither were giving me the results I was looking for. I ended up rounding up an Ampeg SGT-DI and it solved all of my issues. It gave me two amp tone choices, and a bunch of tone shaping options, perfect for studio use in my opinion. Flip a switch and you're using a different amp! Digging that!

So now all the songs have drums and bass 100% completed! I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere. All bass tracks were performed on either a Fender Rascal, Marcus Miller P7, or my Engelhardt upright bass.

On to recording guitars! -J