I’m pleased to announce the availability of my brand new EP – Ban Hammers. It is the result of a collaboration between myself and various electronic producers based in the United States. The producers who collaborated on this project are Leo Rapture, Nekkron99, Ken Flux Pierce and Mr. 25 Keyz.
The premise was quite simple, the various featured producers were asked to submit a finished instrumental backing track just lacking bass lines. I then attempted to record first take improvisations reacting to the music on first listen. I added a few overdubs here and there and a bit of editing but essentially what you hear are those first ideas as close as possible. The whole project from start to finish was in less than a week.
I suppose what we have here are the first instrumental bass led tracks that i have ever released. I have played bass on hundreds of releases prior to this but mostly either in band or session roles. This however is a unashamedly a bass driven project. I used my Bristol made custom Waghorn Gecko bass through a Sonuus Wahoo filter pedal for most of the sounds adding some MXR bass chorus to sweeten things a touch.
Hello readers old and new! I am going to make a pledge to any of you who enjoy this site or are interested in my musical exploits that I will make much more regular updates. I have so many articles on the back burner waiting for a spot of time to finish that there soon should be a steady flow of new posts and that is a promise!
I am looking more towards the internet and my site as a focus for my activities as in recent times I have crawled out from under the stone of anonymity and through mostly Sonicstate.com I have started to enjoy a more public persona. In the past, I was so preoccupied with my perception that as an artist I should remain somewhat aloof and mysterious but now I realise that just leaves you with a whole heap of nothingness!
So what can we expect in the future? Well I have started writing up little featurettes on some of the notable people I have worked with some of whom are well known and some may be new to you. I have been incredibly lucky in my career so far to have worked with some truly inspirational musicians and artists that I feel I should share some of those experiences. The fairly recent features about Karl Hyde and David Rhodes should give an indication of the type of thing I have planned.
Other features will be around my continuing exploration of music technology and it’s applications. I am first and foremost a live musician who thrives on playing and collaborating with others so it may seem strange that I am so enthusiastic about this subject as it appears to thrive on electronic music and solitary working (both of which I also enjoy). I am, however, constantly interested in developments which encourage collaborations (both physical and virtual) and of bridging the gap between acoustic and electronic. These are the themes I plan to explore in future posts.
Here is a performance I recorded last August of my Jean Guillou influenced piece, The White Flame. I am using my trusty Roland GR55 which is the same unit I have used extensively with Karl Hyde and the rock opera, Pop’pea.
Jean Guillou’s magnificent flames of hair and the inspiration for the title of my piece!
I was interested to see how writing a piece of music within a particular large room would affect my note choices and phrasing. The hall I used in this example is the Upper Room at Cairns Road Baptist Church and I’d like to thank them for the opportunity. The room has a long decay, around the 2.5 second range so therefore lots of long legato notes would work best in that setting. I also wanted to try and use tones that would resonate well within that space so I created a trombone woodwind hybrid using the dual PCM layers of the GR55. I mapped the trombone sounds to the expression pedal which let me create swells over the woodwind base. The GR55 has an incredibly deep programability which I think people aren’t aware of. I have to say though that editing on the unit is no fun and I highly recommend Gumtown’s astonishingly excellent free editor for it available here.
I recently bought a rather unusual bass. It’s a 1979 Overwater OS957 that’s generally referred to these days as an Overwater Original. This particular model is quite interesting as it has a bunch of original features such as the carved top and the graduated fret system. The frets, according to Overwater, have three gauges starting with wide and chunky at the bottom for maximum sustain graduating to a thinner band style of wire at the second octave. Ease of fretting, chording and unbelievable bending action without choking is the claim. I think Overwater stopped this process at some point probably because it was a PITA to build and possibly didn’t actually make that much of a difference. I’ll try and contact Chris May the luthier who made this, to validate the claims. Speaking of Chris May, I heard a rumour that John Entwistle was involved in the design of this bass which makes sense as it does resemble some of his later designs of Buzzard basses for both Status and Warwick. I can’t seem to find anything to back that up other than it was known that Entwistle had some Overwaters. Overwater are still around today making fine basses and have recently teamed up with Tanglewood to offer a budget range too.
From behind you can see how the through neck is sculpted to allow for easy access up “the dusty end”.
On this video I play the bass firstly with a blend of both pickups then the rear, front then a blend again.
I bought this bass about a month ago but then immediately took it to my guitar tech, the fabulous Gareth Lewis, based in Cardiff to get a few bits and bobs done on it. I have known Gareth for many years and have played in the Tanya Walker band with him. I always take my basses to him for setups and tweaks and he always manages to make them beautiful instruments to play. Gareth is such a good musician too and has a huge passion for guitars. I strongly recommend him for all guitar repair and setups. You can contact him through his Facebook page here.
I had the wiring returned to its original format as the previous owner had modded it to his preferred pickup 1 vol, tone, pickup 2 vol, tone. It is now master volume, master tone, pickup 1 vol, pickup 2 volume. I think I prefer it this way. Once I collected this bass last week, I used it at a Rumble-O’s gig, the surf band I play in. The bass was completely the wrong one for this band! It was way too forceful sounding so the next gig I returned to using my regular surf bass, my Reverend Rumblefish!
Here I am playing the Overwater with The Rumble-O’s in a little Vine my wife took.
I didn’t get this bass for The Rumble-O’s though, I got it for my new top secret project! I may let some details slip on here though…
I got this bass from an Overwater enthusiast called Steve “Tayste” Taylor up near Macclesfield, England. Steve is a superb innovative bassist and we spent a great afternoon jamming and talking all things bass. His fine blog is here. Steve has owned 5 Overwaters over the years and luckily I caught him at a time where he was trying to cut back a bit and was selling off two Overwaters including a lovely fretless that I was sorely tempted to get. He did however, give me one hell of a tricky choice with the bass, either I could take it with its original brown leather covered hard case or a proper touring flightcase with a laser cut insert specially made for this bass. Arrgh!! Do I go for the original case knowing that finding another would be next to impossible or go for the excellent professional touring option. In the end I plumped for the original reasoning that I could get a custom case at a later date. Problem is though, the Overwater is a least 4 inches longer than a precision bass and thus a tricky bass to house. Steve, who is a very generous soul however, offered me both cases for a little extra dough – total no brainer! I have now wrapped, sealed and stored the original case and am happy to be using it with the hard core flight case.
This summer I was fortunate to play bass with a bona fide guitar legend, David Rhodes. David has been Peter Gabriel’s guitarist since 1980 and has played on all of his releases since then. He has also performed with Paul McCartney, Scott Walker, Joan Armatrading and perhaps most thrillingly for me, Talk Talk. It is David’s spidery lead line that adorns Life’s What You Make It, one of my all time favourite songs!
David is renowned for his minimal and spare approach to guitar, playing just the right thing. He is also a terrific singer and songwriter. The shows I have played with David are in support of his new album, simply titled Rhodes. This is his second solo release with the first, Bittersweet released back in 2010. Rhodes is now also the name of the group too, a three piece featuring Ged Lynch on drums. Ged has also played for Gabriel, 13 years or so following on from The Icicle Works, Ruthless Rap Assassins and Black Grape.
The bassist on both of David’s albums is the superb Charlie Jones. Currently playing in Goldfrapp, Charlie was Robert Plant’s bassist for years and played on all the Zep related reformations in the 90’s – Unledded, No Quarter and Walking into Clarkside. Charlie has also just released his first album, Love Form on September 13th. With David used to playing with Charlie and Gabriel’s bassist, Tony Levin, I had rather big shoes to fill!
Our first show was in Liechtenstein, the tiny country squeezed between Switzerland and Austria. We performed in a fabulous studio in front of a small invited audience. The first song we played was Rhodes album opener If I Could Empty My Head.
We then went on to play a selection of tunes from the album including this slamming tune Monkey On My Back:
And You Are The North Wind:
We played 9 songs including a German version of Waggle Dance. We revisited Waggle Dance for our final performance where David caught me showing off in front of the camera calling me a tart! I subsequently made a big mistake and managed to nearly put David off!
As well as the performances, a short interview with David took place:
The performance was recorded on two inch tape by the great Little Konzett of Little Big Beat.
This session and the following show was organised by Austria’s top promoter Alex Nussbaumer. Alex is a fabulous, energetic and positive chap who came to meet us at the airport. He knew David and Ged from previous Peter Gabriel shows but surprisingly he also seemed to know me. He kept going through possible connections until he realised that he knew me from my regular appearances on Sonic State’s weekly podcast Sonic Talk! Alex is a regular listener to the show and I suppose out of context he was convinced he knew me!
Here is a video about the live sessions they make in Liechtenstein:
The following day we performed a free outside show in Vaduz, capital of Liechtenstein. This was a great fun performance despite the rain. Here is an audience filmed clip of the song Crazy Jane from David’s earlier album Bittersweet:
Gaz Williams 