First off the title, Be The Fish came from my buddy getting skunked on a fishing trip and another friend saying "Be The Fish", which is a take off of the Caddy Shack phrase spoken by Chevy Chase, "Be the Ball".
So my songwriting path can go in various directions and have various starts. This one started on the guitar and I recorded a guitar duet. Then I found this great BIAB jazz waltz groove that fit like a glove and made another recording. And years later and most recently I made a third recording with my sometimes collaborator Keith Forrest.
I'd suggest listening to all three videos to hear the tunes evolution and how BIAB played a part. If you want to save time, just listen to a small piece of the first two videos and then the last video.
And the educational value of BIAB, I often will learn bits and pieces from the real tracks on my own instruments, especially bass guitar. I think on this one I did grab onto the RT bass groove for my own bass lines.
Guitar duet:
BIAB version: ****** Song Summary ************* Title: Be the Fish File:Be the Fish.SGU Key=A , Tempo 165, Length (m:s)=3:19 8 bar intro, 54 bar chorus, from bar 9 to bar 62. Repeat x3 choruses, tag ending, after bar 62 No Melody No Soloist track. Song is saved with Volume, Pan, Reverb, Chorus, Bank0, Style is _JWALTZP.STY (Medium Jazz Waltz w/ Piano)
RealTracks in style: ~546:Bass, Acoustic, Jazz Waltz Sw 140 RealTracks in style: ~552:Piano, Acoustic, Rhythm Jazz Waltz Sw 140 RealDrums [in style:JazzBrushesWaltz: a: Brushes b: Snare, Ride
*******************
Final collab version:
The piano RT is in this final version, EZdrummer for drums, and we played the rest (including Keith playing vibraphone patch on his keyboard).
Frank, Very cool collaboration. Final cut sounds amazing! Was interesting to see the development. Mix is ACE! Congrats to you & crew and thank you for sharing!
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to - and watching - your song journey.
Excellent tone and playing throughout.
I'd be interested to know how you record your guitar (interface?, amp sims? effects?). And if you feel like it, talk about why you dropped the nylon in favor of the tele? And why you chose to use an EZDrummer track instead of the BIAB jazz drummer?
Your videos are "simple" but VERY effective. Easy (and enjoyable) to watch. What are you using to record video? and what software to create the video?
Frank, Very cool collaboration. Final cut sounds amazing! Was interesting to see the development. Mix is ACE! Congrats to you & crew and thank you for sharing!
Misha.
Thanks Misha, I appreciate the encouragement. Cheers
Originally Posted By: Tano Music
Loved your story-line of song evolution! Really appreciated you posting the chart as well. Great work, team!!
Thanks Tano, I thought including the chart for a tune like this was a good way to mix it up, never done that before. Cheers
Originally Posted By: floyd jane
Frank,
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to - and watching - your song journey.
Excellent tone and playing throughout.
I'd be interested to know how you record your guitar (interface?, amp sims? effects?). And if you feel like it, talk about why you dropped the nylon in favor of the tele? And why you chose to use an EZDrummer track instead of the BIAB jazz drummer?
Your videos are "simple" but VERY effective. Easy (and enjoyable) to watch. What are you using to record video? and what software to create the video?
Cool stuff!
fj
Hi Floyd, thanks for the encouraging words.
The guitars were recorded with an SM57 on a Quilter Micropro amp. I really like the lightweight but powerful Quilter and I find it is a great amp for pedals. I set the gain on the Quilter to were it sounds clean with my regular picking attack but with a harder attack I hear just a little bit of gain. I have 8 pedals on my pedal board and always have the compressor on to act as a buffer, which is the first pedal in the chain. My compressor setting is medium light.
The Tele didn't have any other effects from the pedal board. I had a little bit of eq and compression added in Reaper (my DAW).
I used a King of Blues drive pedal on the Ibanez semi-hollowbody guitar. Not too much though. EQ, Compression and Delay were added in Reaper.
As an aside, I have recently been getting into the Amplitube 4 amp sim and have gotten a tone I really like for the semi-hollowbody guitar. Still working on it for the strat and tele.
I didn't give the tele vs. nylon any thought really, the tele was the guitar I happened to have near at hand at the time.
EzDrummer2 has been my go to drums for a couple years now. The BIAB drums would have been just as good for this. The BIAB grooves are a great source for drum tracks as are the EZDrummer grooves, both played by professional drummers and both not quantized (not snapped to the grid). I've acquired several drum kits and a whole bunch of midi libraries. What I like about EZDrummer is I can switch between a bunch of drum kits, and I can easily modify patterns such as muting all but the high hat for this measure, or adding a crash to the 1 of this measure, or changing the hi hat pattern to a ride pattern, etc. and there are a lot of variations within one groove to select and develop a song from. Also, I have control of volume, panning, reverb, velocity and more over each individual element of the drum kit.
I use a free video editor called VSDC. I've tried a few different ones and this one seems to run the best on my PC. The issue I've had with video editing is that my PC gets overwhelmed when I have too many videos running simultaneously. VSDC has worked the best for this and I can easily run three videos at a time, and if I go past three I can lower the resolution during the editing process and I've been able to run five at the same time. This is all very dependent on how powerful of a computer you have; video editing is the most processor intensive thing I do on my computer.
Thanks for the questions, I like to nerd out on this kind of stuff.
Nice and reminds us of Brubeck -- not Take Five but just something about the feel.
We enjoyed reading your nerd out response to floyd. It was very interesting.
We got the notion that the rhythm, lead, and bass players might have worked together before They are quite accomplished players.
Enjoyed it. Comments are based on two passes thru version 3 but will check out the others.
J&B
PS And that scat! Yes! Might be the only scat posted here since Janice's song named, well, Scat! (Might be the only song here since she and floyd did some scatting years ago.)
Our albums and singles are on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Pandora and more. If interested search on Janice Merritt. Thanks! Our Videos
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but just something about the feel.
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