The Details Of Putting Together A Bass Line

And when you work on these tracks, you really kind of want to listen, try different things. Yeah, listen to the instruments and see, you know, what, you know, okay, maybe if I did this, let me try this. Bass drum's doing this. Now we have that. Don't, don't, right? So, but you were playing, playing it different than, than what, what I thought I was thinking, but you sound like you were playing. That was my next point. Yeah, what do we do with the harmony there? Because if we go bum bum, that note is still in the C chord, I mean it's still part of the, the C part of the sound. Yeah, one and two, one and two, that five needs to be on the bomp bump, one and two and three, right? It needs to be right on that three. So if I preempt it by the and of two, it kind of takes its spark out, it doesn't work as well, which is interesting, because when you think about the difference an eighth note can make, it's actually better not to do it at all than to actually do it, that just doesn't work. So if you go bom bom, don't, boom boom, see, the bass doesn't have to follow the bass drum and everything. Yeah, you know, so you could like do one take of this and just do, you know, that all the way through, or you could go, now that sounds a little bit redundant, when you can't do it like that and by itself. And when I was doing it with the track, there was a part of me that was saying it almost seemed like it was too much. Yeah, but it also seemed like if I did it once in a while, you know, it may not work either, but then again, you know, it, depending on how you did it and how much you put into it, would determine how much, you know, you could do that, and it would actually enhance and be good for the track, as opposed to being distracting in some way. Yeah, yeah, so the moral of the story is that even something as simple as one little eighth note can really cause you, you know, to sit down and think, because, you know, depending on how you use that eighth note, it could really make or break that particular approach to the track. Yeah, yeah, so I find that kind of stuff very interesting, you know, how one little thing can just be a deal breaker like that. Yeah, which, which again leads you to think, so, okay, well, if I'm doing bass lines, I really need to consider every note and really think about what everything is doing and how the song is reacting to it. Yeah, so what this again teaches you is to listen deeper into the song, which is really part of the reason for doing these band-in-the-pocket things. I, you know, I've said, okay, well, we're creating a recording scenario, you know, like something you might do in a studio, but it's also a listening exercise. Say, hey, listen to that, this, you know, this doesn't work there, that one little thing, you know, and really get into it and figure it out, you know. Yeah, so that's what's really important here. So basically, what I've gotten from this thing with the bass drum is, we could, first of all, do it, we kind of got three ways we could go here. The first is going to be not to do it at all. Yeah, second is going to be to do it sometimes, now how, and how frequently, that remains to be seen, so, you know, the jury's kind of out on that one too, you know, whether it would actually really work at all, or, you know, where we'd actually put it to make it, you know, work, or if it doesn't really matter, if we just make sure we're locked rhythmically and it grooves good, it'll be fine. Yeah, then the third thing is to do it all the time, but if we do it all the time, we need to make sure that we go one, one, five, one, one, five of each chord, not one, five, five. Yep. Now we also have note durational aspects to consider. Yeah, and I mean, basically, they're not going to be, it's not going to be, or, you know, something real short or something like that, you know, obviously would not make sense to do, but the kind of space that you give the notes, though, see, I'm putting a little breath before that eighth note, as opposed to... Yep. Right. Yeah, I like that better too, it feels... Yeah, generally, strategic space adds funkiness to it, you know, but then again, I've done tracks to where, you know, smoothing it out actually works better too. But the main thing about any kind of durational thing that you do is the consistency of it, that's what's really important, that you make sure you do it all the time, or at least phrase it the same way all the time. Yeah, okay, so in a simple little riff pattern like this, all of a sudden, you know, you got all these questions. If you start digging into it, it becomes, wow, you know.