Just me alone, noodling around on my bass with fresh strings:
Let’s see if someone likes this enough to play (or sing?) on it 🙂 As always, thanks for listening 🙂
Bass Amplifier
I was asked to join a band lately, what an honour! More to that later, after first rehearsals and after they’ve accepted me as a new player. Plus the Wikiloops members’ meeting 2020 was announced, and I’m very much looking forward to that (like everyone who has attended one earlier I guess).
Time to get a bass amplifier.
During last years’ Wikiloops meeting we’ve had Marc’s small Markbass Mini CMD 121P which is one of the most sold bass combos out there, and it’s incredible. Small, light, loud. You see it behind my right shoulder in this photo:
There was more gear like Gijs’ stack behind me, plus some smaller amps upstairs in the acoustic/unplugged area. But whenever I played I used that small Markbass. It was perfect except that I personally prefer 15″ speakers to the 12″ it had/has built in.
So for the new band, and for next years’ Wikiloops meeting and any other events where I might have to be heard live, I wanted to get something like that Markbass amp, but with a 15″ speaker if possible. And there are several, and I took the cheapest option. Its name is Markbass CMD JB Players School, and its speaker is black instead of orange, and this is how it looks beside my bass:
Fits just perfectly in the trunk of our small Toyota, but not – as I had hoped but not measured – under our small Ikea tables (guess that 12″ would have fitted, but oh well, one has to make compromises, right?).
And yes, I have tested it against the Mini CMD 121P, and in my opinion, for my taste, and with a (fretted) P(recision) Bass it sounded better than its smaller, lighter, but also more powerful and more expensive brother. A propos loud enough: someone on bassic.de assured me that the one I bought is loud enough in a Big Band context, plus all these modern amplifiers have DI-Outs (and the ones in Markbass amps can even be switched pre or post pre amp just as it should be) – so in case it gets really loud, there’s always a cable running from the amp into the mixer (or recording device, whatever).
Perfect for what I need. And cheaper than the lens with which I took its photograph 🙂
As always, thanks for reading.
Fading Into Nothing
I played on that awesome track by moonchild and by WhiteDrum55, and I also got a remix from FrankMil already, who also renamed the title to ‘Fading in 2 nothing’. Sounds like this:
List of musicians:
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening!
Cory Wong // Today I’m Gonna Get Myself A Real Job (Official Music Video)
This one’s funny – and it even shows a mockup poster of my employer if you look closely:
Enjoy…
On the bed
Thanks for viewing.
Me on film, August 2019
Got my first film back from the lab, together with some prints (10x15cm), and scans on CD which aren’t very good or high-res (but we knew that already, doesn’t matter since these are cheap).
I’m not too convinced with the colours from their Kodak Gold colour negative film (200ASA), so I tried a black & white conversion using RawTherapee, and added a white border in Darkroom with the last image from that film. Looks like this:
Not too bad, my “full frame” camera from ca. 1972 or so, hm? Scaled down to your usual image height for screens like here (1080 pixels high), or even printed on 10x15cm paper, the results are very nice. And I’m sure that they’d be even better if I would scan the images myself (and maybe I’ll do that with a few prettier ones).
Edit: just converted another one to black & white, same method as above:
As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
Smiles for Miles
Just received a terrific remix on a track on which I also played:
The sax is by ‘Fishinmissio’, so the list of musicians – one has left the loops under this account – is like follows:
Thanks Mark for your great Sax! And thanks to everyone else for listening.
The Gentle Rain (featuring Ali Campbell)
Here’s Don, Ali, and me:
Ali isn’t on Wikiloops as far as I know, so it doesn’t make much sense to show the list of musicians with just Don and me.
Oh, and this is of course not my normal fretless bass, it’s the Karoryfer “Meatbass” which is a great free sample library of a 1958 Otto Rubner double (or contra) bass:
So thanks to Karoryfer and to Ludwik for the nicely sampled instrument as well. You guys rock!
As always, thanks for reading, and for listening.
A new mini keyboard for me, and my first contact with it
Got this one on Monday:
And I used it together with a free synthesizer in Ardour to record this:
This has several remixes already (three alone this morning), and for one of these remixes I used another free virtual instrument, and I also borrowed this from Zuleikha:
This is Zuleikha’s Ortega “ruocean-ce” ukulele which was one of her birthday presents for her 14th last year. As you can probably see in the photo (or read in its product description), it has an in-built tuner, so it also has a piezo pickup and a preamp built in – and so you can plug it in directly into an interface like I do it with my bass guitar as well. For the recording I used this, and I also used my Røde NT-1A microphone to get my fingering noises on its strings (and the foot-patting, couldn’t really filter all of it out).
Not that easy to change from a bass to that g’-c’-e’-a’ tuning of the little thing… 🙂 But for the few chords (and a simple Reggae rhythm) which I used here I think I figured it out…
The three remixes from this morning were all on top of that recorded piano/ukulele one, see the ‘loops if you want to hear these.
And as always, thanks for reading, and also for listening.
In Time – an album by Zuleikha, Wolfgang & friends from Wikiloops
With Zuleikha’s latest upload from last Thursday, we completed an album featuring her as well as other ‘loopers and myself. So here’s the cover, the sleeve, and a link to it:
So please listen to it and/or download the album on its page on Wikiloops. See my other albums in the widget area on the right of this page (also with links to their respective pages).
And as always, thanks for reading and/or listening.