Category: free software

Devin’s take onto Arno’s original “Under the wind of the cold night” template, on which Thierry and me had played before as “Ton parfum“:

I decided that my bass from “Ton parfum” still fitted nicely into this one, so I simply added it again. That makes the list of musicians for this one as:

And since some people had commented onto “Ton parfum” because of my bass tone, here’s some short technical info in case you want to get a nice, mellow, and full tone like that. The technique I used for this is called “serial compression”, and what it means is that you simply add two compressors in a row, and play around with their settings. In my case, with the Calf compressor, it looked like this:

You see that both have a ratio of about 1:4 which is good for bass (tho normally I use less, like 1:3 or so). And while the first one does the heavy lifting with that additional +6dB boost, the second one still smoothes out things a bit. It’s not a technique you could use on every track (normally I use just one compressor with a 1:3 ratio or thereabouts), but here it fitted quite nicely.

On the Ardour channel strip on the left, you see that both instances of the Calf compressor are used pre fader. There’s also the GxSVT amp/cabinet simulation plugin from the Guitarix project, but that one is turned off here. Plus there’s a Calf limiter post fader, set to cut everything at -0.5dB just in case.

And that’s pretty much all there is to say about the tone. My Squier VM Precision Fretless Bass with its stock roundwound Fender strings was directly plugged into the Focusrite 6i6 2nd gen interface, and everything else was free software (Debian GNU/Linux with additional KXStudio repositories, Ardour, Calf Plugins). A cheap but effective setup as you can hear.

Thanks for listening, and for reading.

Update, from next morning (at least, morning here in Europe):

Perfect add from Mark – I suggested using some brushes, and he delivered like a pro:

That makes the new list of musicians:

Thanks everyone for making this so wonderful!

Update from Sunday evening (CEST):

On top of Mark’s brushed drumkit, Tof from France added his beautiful guitar. Listen:

List of musicians:

Thanks for listening.

I saw this “Funky Duck” title in Wikiloops, and of course I was reminded of the same title used by Vulfpeck. But the original upload from DaFunkyDrummer, and the added bass from Woodstock had nothing to do with that.

Lots of space for other musicians in this one, I thought, and because I liked the groove and what was there very much already, I decided to download and to play around with it for a bit.

In the end, I used effects from Guitarix in a Carla Rack host in my Ardour DAW, namely the plugins/pedals GxQuack, and GxHyperion. Looks like this on my screen:

And that sounds like this (the higher-pitched, and more distorted second bass is mine):

Musicians:

And I got remixed already, by Pit Brett who added his guitar and harp in just one upload. Thanks Pit! Now this – his – version sounds like this:

Musicians:

Very nice. There was another download already, so I’m eager to see what will probably be coming. My suggestion was some kind of “bass fest” (there is a very good one already in the loops). Let’s wait and see. Or hear. 🙂

Thanks for reading, and for listening.