Saw Peter Cox live at the Robin2 blues club in Wolverhampton on Saturday night.  As you can see from the picture Pete was in fine spirits and good form and didn’t seem to be missing his partner in crime too much who was on his marathon treck!

The gig went very well, a nice performance from the support band A-Side and then Pete came on at 10pm to do a lively set of numbers from his first solo album, a collection of Motown numbers and some general covers.

Great gig all round with Pete putting in his usual performance levels and his voice just seems to be getting better and better with age, a nice tight backing band in particular Deeral on guitar, and Richard Brook on drums were excellent.

Pete posing for the camera onstage at The Robin 2

Check out the latest edition of "Bass Player" magazine for a great feature on the late great Bernard Edwards.

Great background on Bernard, including his move from guitar to bass, resulting in the unique fingered style that spawned the fast run down bass line for "Everybody Dance" by Chic - which often resulted in his bass being dripping with his own blood at the end of the song...now THAT'S commitment!

Check out the January 2008 issue of the US magazine - "Bass Player", which features JT on the cover.

Interesting article goes along with this, including a transcription of the Rio bassline - for those who don't already know it  (just don't forget the ghost notes!) in addition to current gear which seems to be mainly Peavy these days - hence my campaign for the SB-1000JT to come back out of the closet!

Just posted a new track on my MySpace page - this should be the first of the five tracks available in the MySpace player.

The track is called "This Side Of The Sun" and is a play on words.  The original track is a track called "The Other Side Of The Sun" - fans of John Taylor will recognise the basic bassline.  The original track builds this line into a song - you can check it out on John's solo CD "Techno For Two".  However, I'd always liked the bass part on it's own merit and decided to add some slap to it to develop it a little.  Once I'd done this, I decided to add some extra bass parts to flesh the sound out and this is the result.  All the sounds you hear on this are bass - no keyboards or other instruments used.  Hopefully John wouldn't mind this "cover version" too much if he heard it (yeah like he's really going to be visiting my MySpace page! lol).

Enjoy!

Matt

Just posted a new track on my MySpace page.  This track - Off Shore - was a piece of music that was in my head over my recent holiday and was driving me crazy!  The only solution was to get it recorded to get it out of my head.  During recording, the idea changed slightly from a structured effort to just a repeat of the basic chords with a fretless bass piece improvised over the top.  This seemed to work much better than the "song" idea and just flowed more into an ambient piece instead...

I also added a little bit of "acoustic guitar" phrasing over the top, this was done with my bass also, with added effects to simulate an acoustic guitar type sound.

Enjoy...

New track added - 'Funk ATTACK'

This is the first of hopefully more collaborations with my mate Claud, who lives at Squirrel Senses on MySpace Music.

Claud took my original source files from Slappin' 2 and added some funky live drums, keyboards and then produced a remix and masterdown of the resulting choon.  Bake in the oven for 5 minutes to bring to the boil and hey presto!  Instant cream yer pants stuff.

Enjoy!

Be sure to check out Claud's MySpace Music page where you can hear more of his drumming and also some of his own compositions at the link below:

http://www.myspace.com/squirrelsenses

Here's my "take 2" Slappin' track.  This is a redo of the original Slappin' that I did, but without the drum machine loop over the top.

The track has a few differences to the first version, namely, that I've used an envelope filter on various parts of this like the "fingered" riff and some background high end riffs (you can just hear em in the background in the middle of the track).

All in all, I think the track works better without the drum machine loop as it sounded pretty "robotic" (as do most drum machines unless you really want to spend hours and hours programming them).  I prepared this track for a drummer mate to have a bash at adding some drum parts, but the overall speed of the track was too fast to add a good groove to - rather than lose the track altogether, might as well put it up here - especially as I only had two MP3 tracks up to date (but I'm working on that!).

 

Enjoy...

Added my first track.  This is called "Slappin'" - for the obvious reasons when you hear it!  I did the track as a tester as this was while I was getting to grips with my new Boss BR600 digital recorder.

The track involves one of the default drum patterns on the BR600 and then features double tracking my bass parts on the track.  I think there are 3 bass tracks on there in total from what I can remember, including the initial slap/popping track, using the onboard COSM effects to add a little flange to the sound.  I then added a lower slap track over the top and finished off with a finger part to add a little spice.  Enjoy!

Second track added.  I tried to be a little more adventurous here and use my totally appalling keyboard skills (or lack thereof!).  I programmed a basic drum pattern into the BR600 and looped this throughout.  I then added the low end bass part using the onboard COSM effects - I think this effect was called "Tiger Bass" and gave a really nice low envelopy rumble sound.  I then added a more conventional slapped bassline over the top of this.

Keyboard parts include a background piano section repeating throughout and some high strings.  I added a "dirty" organ sound to give accents by putting the keyboard through my Boss Bass effects board, adding lots of overdrive and some reverb.

Once this was done, I decided I wanted to add some dirty guitar, only two problems, I don't play guitar and don't even own a guitar!  I put the bass through my boss effects board, adding overdrive metal, loads of reverb and upped the octave 2 times - this gave a passable impersonation of an electric guitar.  I then added the guitar by just improvising over the top, following the bass riff and adding string bend accents - when held they also gave some nice unintended high frequency feedback.  Not sure about the final addition of the guitar part as I am by no means a guitar player and the string bending was difficult on a bass due to how far the strings needed to be bent to achieve the notes.  This did make the solo sound really nice and "nasty", but I think I might redo this as it loses tone with the song at points. 

The title for the track came to me after recording as it kind of reminded me of incidental music that's normally played during those old detective shows such as The Professionals - I just "borrowed" from Elvis Costello then and hey presto.  Enjoy!