How do you get that t h i c c bass tone? | Q+A

welcome everybody to the super fast instagram q a let's get thick this video is brought to you by skillshare what do you use to get that thick bass tone so for me the secret to a thick base tone is compression what you're doing when you're compressing a bass signal is you're making the loud parts quieter and the choir part's loud so you get this like thick base patty thing i'm going to show you what i mean i have here a delicious and tasty groove that will go very well with our base patty from the one and only josh bailey [Music] damn that guy durms good so i'm to play a simple bass line that goes along with this tasty groove and it's important that it's simple because simple bass lines work with this tone i feel a lot better than more complicated [Music] ones [Music] so that sounds pretty good already but i think we can make it sound thicker and juicier the first step is amp emulation i'm just running the bass directly into my audio interface and having the emulation of an amplifier and a cabinet in a room is going to create a much rounder sound i'm going to use the ampeg svt pro for the amplifier and then for the cabinet i'm going to use an impulse response of an svt 8x10 cabinet which is a cabinet which is often referred to as refrigerator because it's literally the size and shape of a refrigerator nothing like a refrigerator for the thickness sounds like this sounds thick but we can definitely go thicker than that next step is adding a compressor i have ableton's built-in compressor bump the ratio up real high drop the threshold down and now we get this base patty that i was talking about [Music] all right we're getting somewhere that is juicy as hell but we can go even further than that once we start adding saturation i'm going to use a couple of ableton live's built-in saturation plug-ins which are the warm-up lows and warm-up highs and when we do that it sounds like this [Music] there's now like a growl to it which comes from a lot of the slides that i was doing so i knew what kind of tone that i was going for and then i matched my bass playing accordingly the tone and the post-processing directly influence how you play it before all this stuff gets added if you want to go even crazier with the saturation we can add ableton live's drum buss effect [Music] anyway this is kind of along the lines of what i think about when i think about a thick base tone something that has a lot of meat something that punches very hard and growls something that makes playing simple bass lines feel so good especially when you have somebody like josh bailey to play them with god bless you josh bailey bass is really the superior instrument isn't it how many cups of coffee in 24 hours so on twitch we did a 24-hour live stream for charity i'm gonna talk a little bit more about that later but yes i drink a lot of coffee during it i think it was five cups of coffee six maybe which honestly is not that much more than what i drink normally i may have a problem how do i use augmented chords there's two pretty common ways in popular music the first way is the five augmented chord resolving to the one so in the key of c we have g augmented resolving to c very nice the other way that it's very commonly used has been called the chromatic embellishment of static harmony or sesh c-e-s-h by david baker berkeley calls it a line cliche because at one point it was so common in popular tin pan alley songs in like the 40s and 50s that it was a little bit of a cliche if you had a c chord you could go to a c augmented chord followed by a c6 chord back to a c augmented giving you this nice which is kind of like the progression of rain on my parade for all of you barbra streisand fans i know there are so many of you guys who watch my youtube channel but she is awesome so yeah barbra streisand on adamelia now tell me what to do c major seven over f sharp question mark well that's pretty dissonant but one of the nice things about any kind of chord is that the context really governs how you feel about it for example [Music] that sounds spooky and mysterious that sounds goofy and kind of ironic maybe [Music] that just sounds like kind of a nice resolution it's just all how you use the dissonance something that might just sound like a meme out of context can sound quite nice in context what do you think about commercial songs getting shorter and shorter first of all there's always been very short pop songs eleanor rigby by the beatles it's actually i think only a two minute song let me double check so i don't look like an idiot on the youtubes it is two minutes and five seconds i don't look like a total idiot it's it's honestly not that much longer than old town road which is less than two minutes it's just a minute and 53 seconds but if you think about like the lengths of pop songs in general it's actually pretty arbitrary that three minutes has been like the default length for pop music the reason why the convention started was entirely technological it used to be that records lps could only play three and a half minutes of music per side i believe so jazz records in the 20s and 30s and 40s all had arrangements music written out to be no more than three minutes in length so the tech directly influenced the length of the music because nobody would be able to listen to the music unless it was less than three minutes in length it's like it was physically impossible for them to listen to recorded music that way we're seeing that again with music proliferating on social media platforms particularly on tick tock where you just won't be able to listen to a song when you first encounter it on tiktok for example for more than 60 seconds that's like impossible so songs are becoming shorter and shorter the meat of the music is becoming shorter and shorter to meet that trend that technological trend just as it did in the 20s 30s and 40s the more things change the more they stay the same what's the rhythmic equivalent to perfect pitch is there absolute rhythm not that i know of you know there are people who are able to count off specific tempe very very regularly like if you said count at 120 beats per minute there are some people who could do that but it's like not absolute and also it's not that useful of a skill to have honestly what does that say quarter note equals 215. count me a 215. a one two three four one two three four christ am i to understand that you cannot read tempo it's much more important to have a steady tempo than an absolute tempo kind of like having relative pitch honestly how can you afford to live in new york city patreon thanks patreon letting me live in new york city as well as have hair why the note a is feminine while b is rude and c is elegant i'm the only one making this associations so what you have is something called grapheme personification which is actually a fairly common manifestation of synesthesia which is the pairing of different senses i have graphene color synthesis where different notes have different colors and i've never seen much study or research into different notes having different personalities but it makes total sense with the way that we understand how synesthesia works you're probably not the only person making these associations but the nice thing about synesthesia or the interesting thing anyway is that it's always personal so these are your own personal feelings about the personalities of the musical notes and they probably won't be shared specifically by anybody is it possible to have triple sharp slash triple flats yes it technically is possible this right here is an f triple sharp that x looking thing is the double sharp and then you just add another sharp at the end of it the use cases for this kind of notation are pretty extreme unless you just want to annoy people in that case yeah go for it triple sharps this is an f triple sharp hell yeah charles mingus the black saint and the sinner lady thoughts yeah i love the record black saint in the center lady absolutely amazing i love how charlie mariano plays on it alto saxophone player who's kind of like charles mingus's johnny hodges johnny hodges was the alpha saxophone player for duke ellington and had such an intense warm lead tone that really carried the sound of the duke ellington orchestra and charlie mariano's kind of like that on charles is the black saint in the center lady it's a great record there's some really intense orchestration on it it's dense there's a lot of collective improvisation but it is beautiful it is dark and it is charles mingus's uh i don't say masterwork but it's very good it is one of my favorite records by charles magnus how did you become that good in playing piano was it also classical training so i play uh what's called arrangers piano when you're learning about jazz arranging especially big band arranging a lot of the time you're learning things like what a drop two chord sounds like and you have to play that out on the piano and through the process of learning composition and arranging the piano just becomes a very expedient way of learning these arranging techniques so no i didn't have any classical training but i did stumble my way through jazz arranging by plunking out chords on the piano now that trap is fully integrated in mainstream pop music what do you think will be the next big thing it's definitely going to be hyper pop and the reason why i know is because of the reaction to rebecca pillax a cover i guess a remix of her own song friday her hyper pop remix the general reaction to this from anybody over the age of 25 has been something of general revulsion like oh my god can you hear what the kids are listening to these days it's such garbage which is a tale as old as time right that has been the reaction to trap music to dubstep to rap music to rock and roll i'm enthusiastically here for this sound because it's so over the top and uh yeah this will be the sound of the 2020s i promise you in fact i predicted some of this maybe a year ago where i was saying like the bass boosted sound of tiktok would find its way into pop music and here it is hyper pop baby it's here to stay how did you record your gigs before the pandemic happened i'm amazed by the quality well it depended on each gig whenever i was playing at rockwood music hall they would have multi-track recordings that you could get and then i could do a little bit of mixing afterwards which gives the really clean sound [Music] in lieu of that'll often set up a zoom recorder to act as an overhead mic for the drums and then i'm able to plug in other sources like say my bass going direct in and this acts as a really really powerful tool you can then place other microphones around the band stand to capture other sound sources so i taped this microphone to sac singer's music stand for the bit awards vlog so i got a very full sound [Music] right there right there that's that microphone taped to the music stand that's how you do it but for more diy situations honestly the microphone on a gopro is not that bad because it will capture its stereo image and if you can eq a little bit more high end into the sound of a gopro one of the newer ones and put it like at the end of your base like what i end up doing often it's not bad if you're being really diy about it turning the gain down on the voice notes memo of your iphone and placing it strategically on the bandstand can also get pretty decent results is it appropriate to headbang to holst's mars the english composer gustav holtz wrote the planet suite where every movement reflected a different planet and the mythological deity and the characteristics of that mythological deity associated with each planet and the first movement is mars bringer of war and not only is it appropriate to head bring head bring head bring to head bang to mars it's damn well necessary [Music] [Applause] [Music] ah so good thoughts on cruise gigs not the lounge bands i mean the show band i think cruise gigs are great for people coming out of music school who need money and need experience i know a lot of people who got their start on cruisegigs and really developed their craft as performing musicians and as working musicians but there is definitely this trap that i have heard of a lot of people getting into which is once you start down that cruise ship rabbit hole it's very difficult to get out of it when you're doing the cruise ship circuit you're not developing a network on land you're not developing a network in any scene so it's very difficult to get started again once you have all this experience playing these like cruise ship shows it's also something i've heard that's very dark alcohol on cruise ships is very inexpensive for people playing on them and there's not a lot of stuff to do when you're actually on a cruise ship so very often people develop drinking habits and it's a very can be a very toxic environment unless you have the right group of people in the right kind of support network this is by the way stuff that i'm hearing secondhand i've never done these kinds of gigs but i do know a lot of people who have done them and you will hear a variety of different opinions on them i think though that for some people they are good but i probably wouldn't recommend going into cruise ship gigs over the age of say 30. i would not want to do that now no no no no cruise ships for me out of the types of videos you've done which have been your fave example q a video essay song analysis etc definitely the videos where i get to collaborate with other musicians other youtubers other composers like the ugly lydian video the uh making locrian sound good video the tots for toddlers video these kinds of things far and above are my favorite because i get to you know i get to make music with people and that's something that is very special and very near and dear to my heart video asses are fun i do get stuff out of them and i do get stuff out of these q and a's but it's those collab videos that's [Music] music community what are some good quintuplet songs go check out my bandmate sean crowder's quintuplet swing playlist on spotify there is a plethora a veritable plethora i say of quintuplet songs for you to check out on that playlist dang that's sick what's today's sponsor i'm glad you asked that question today's sponsor is skillshare skillshare is an online community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people one such class is learn how to mix music with the grammy-nominated engineer young guru so that you can get not just your bass tone sounding thick but your entire mix that way i can start to hear the sweet spot of where i want the kick to be skillshare is curated specifically for learning so there are no ads and they're constantly adding new classes so you can follow wherever your creativity takes you if you're interested in that free skillshare premium link it is in the description the first 1000 people to click the link in the description will get a free skillshare premium membership after that it is less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription anyway thank you so much for watching this has been adam neely's super fast instagram q a follow me over on instagram if you'd like to submit questions for a future q a have a good one everybody and until next time

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 419,608

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: phgoTLs4b8g

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021