Some days ago Gijs (aka “Fivestringer”), a friend of mine from Wikiloops recommended his favourite contemporary upright bass player, Brian Bromberg. And of course I had to listen, and yes, Gijs is right about Brian – the man is a real force. Listen to his Slow Burn song from his album Downright Upright (which is on my wishlist of course):
Wow. ToDo list: transcribe this, and play it on my fretless (I don’t have an upright bass).
After voting for our current EU elections, I decided to go to Mönchbruch castle again with my camera. So I took a few photos, the first with the 14-42mm zoom, the others with the 40-150mm one:
Last night, Zuleikha uploaded her newest composition “Last Peace” to Wikiloops. I had helped her a bit with getting the Addictive Keys Studio Grand into Ardour, so she mentioned me as well on her lovely track. And over the night, she got 11 thumb ups, 5 downloads and 1 remix already as you can see here or on her track:
I also like her new avatar there which she drew herself:
And as you can see, she also received a first remix already, which were some jazzy drums & guitar played by João (nickname jjdf) from Portugal. Obrigado!
Over at Wikiloops, the album of today was again one by my friend, Monsieur OliVBee from Paris, France. And in his ‘Deep Dark Blue‘, he features another great singer which is AnneCozean from the American west coast:
I listened to this today at work when I needed to blend out discussions and/or telephone calls from colleagues, and again I was blown away by the quality, the taste, and the musicality of all involved musicians. And by Anne’s voice of course. Another outstanding album from Oliv and friends.
And I will definitely listen to his other albums which are yet unknown to me, like ‘MOF on the loops‘ (featuring marmotte), or ‘Instrumentals‘.
This is world-class music, and if you don’t know and/or didn’t hear anything about Wikiloops yet, just listen to one of these to get an idea of what it’s all about. Heartily recommended, and another instant fav and download from me.
At Wikiloops, we have that concept of a ‘watchlist’, and mine got filled quite a lot recently. Each time I sit at work and listen to something where I think I could add something, I add it to this watchlist – so mine currently has over 100 gems inside:
At home, I’ll download all of these when I have the time, and start ‘working’ on them in my DAW (=’Digital Audio Workstation’). Convert MP3s to WAVs with Audacity first, then load them into Ardour. Set the tempo, check with a metronome, eventually make a clicktrack and/or a count-in. See if I can enhance the given audio, and it helps if you have single HD tracks because a drum kit or a guitar might need other treatments than a voice.
Often I also add markers where the chords change or to separate parts of the song so during recording I can see the structure.
And finally I’ll grab my bass and play.
And all of this is great fun. I’m learning so many different things. And I’m so glad that I found Wikiloops…
If you are reading this blog since a while then you probably know that I’m hosting almost all of my photos on Flickr. I have a paid account with them of the old sort, which gives me unlimited storage (an offer which doesn’t exist anymore since a few years).
Flickr was bought by Smugmug, and they’re finally moving all content from Yahoo’s servers and infrastructure to Smugmug’s hosting provider which is Amazon AWS. My pictures will move into the cloud…
This all will happen on Thursday 12am GMT which means 1400 CEST, and it will last for maybe 12 hours. Here’s what’s written in Flickr’s public announcement:
On May 22, 2019, Flickr will be down for planned maintenance for about 12 hours starting at 5pm PDT (that’s 8pm EDT or 12am GMT on May 23).
This will of course lead to the fact that you won’t see most of my photos on this page for about 12 hours, and so I’ll have to apologise for this.
And all of a sudden it’s relatively warm again, after all those weeks with really low temperatures which we had now. So I took my camera and walked through the nearby wood, direction of Frankfurt Airport. Some things I saw were:
It felt good to be out again, and to listen to that unbelievable concert of birds.
Here’s another video featuring Keb’ Mo’ which I found via No Treble, a bass players’ mag. And the bass player is definitely worth watching as well, because it’s Christian McBride playing here. Didn’t know the trumpeter until now, but boy that lady plays a bluesy horn as well… so enjoy Keb’ Mo’s “France”:
I haven’t reported about the ‘Playing For Change‘ Foundation and movement since a while. But today this came up in my Youtube stream:
As you can see, it’s a jamming collaboration project very much like Wikiloops, with the difference that at PFC it’s mostly well-known song covers, like a Blues from the 1930s in this case – while at Wikiloops we only allow original material due to legal & copyright matters.
But some members have their own channels, and do their own video creations, edits, and uploads – and maybe we should do more in that direction – so I’m considering filming myself more often when playing the bass, like some of us do. And if all contributors of a song would do that, then we’d have something like PFC as well – with the difference that we make up and play own stuff.