I hope you enjoy my arrangement of Ron Carter’s tune “Eighty-One.”
I’m accompanied by myself on bass (synth) and drum (sampler). I played all the parts.
Some description of my recording setup, because I anticipate a lot of questions:
This was recorded in Reaper, a very powerful and flexible DAW. It’s my first completed project using this tool, and I’m very happy with it. I sequenced the drum part, which is being played by a kit made up of one shot samples released under a CC license which I obtained from freesound. The bass part was performed on an antique Alesis Quadrasynth and recorded as midi, then played on a bass guitar VSTi plugin called 4front bass. I did edit the midi somewhat, mainly just cleaning up multiple note strikes. The bass part behind solos was all one take. So I did actually play that part straight through at real time.
Rhodes was the only thing I recorded directly as audio. My Rhodes nameplate FX loop had a BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer and a Lexicon MPX 100 audio processor in it. The Lexicon was just doing a tempo-synced delay line. The BBE box does whatever it does, which is hard to describe, but I like it. I took stereo outs from the suitcase bottom into my Edirol UA-25, and Live to Reaper with the native ASIO driver for the Edirol box, which works quite well.
I tracked everything in about a day. There’s a FX bus track in Reaper with a simple room reverb and a bit of EQ on it. Sends from each track go to this so I can position each instrument in the foreground or background separately within the same sound stage. I put a mastering limiter on the master track. It increases the average volume by decreasing the dynamic range of everything (makes the soft parts louder).
I rendered that down to a .wav file, which I then synced to the video. That was encoded to FLV and posted to ye olde YouTube. FLV compression damaged the audio somewhat. I tried to keep that minimal, but I have a clean MP3 for you to listen to.
I’m also making the backing track itself available (bass and drums only). Let me know if you record a version with it.
I really like this :) The sound of a Rhodes makes me feel yeehaaa :D
Comment by instrumentenfreak — August 23, 2008 @ 2:24 pm
glad I found this clip - gives me a totally different perspective on funk (along with your tutorial) - namely, funk as a derivative of the blues.
Comment by sfcub69 — August 6, 2008 @ 2:54 pm
Defenitly...GREAT sound an skills...and to watch your hands running up and down...we only can learn from that.But the more i watch this the more i realise that this style (funk-jazz...) it's not an easy "enterprise"Thank you!....and hope for more
Comment by jmnpinheiro — May 25, 2008 @ 3:10 pm
got yourself a rhodes then.....good call.
Comment by LF0 — March 9, 2008 @ 8:54 am
Very sweet voicings really like it :D
Comment by ilikerossi — March 5, 2008 @ 10:03 am
this sounds so good, how did you record it and get it to go through youtube and still retain the sound quality
Comment by Classicrock515 — February 24, 2008 @ 9:34 pm
Thanks for listening. Over the last year or so I've been working on improving the sound quality, but this was tracked in Reaper. Having such a great environment for audio work is crucial. I'm also recording the Rhodes direct at high quality using an Edirol UA-25. I mix and master in Reaper on JBL studio monitors. There is a lot of work involved in producing these.
Comment by volvoxburger — February 24, 2008 @ 10:20 pm
Nice playing, man! Really nailing that jazzy/funky Rhodes sound/style that strikes right at my soul. What advice would you give a musician who is a beginner on piano/keys and wants to learn to play in the style you've demonstrated? For a drummer (who plays bass and guitar decently), I have a good ear, and a working knowledge of chord structure, but the funky/jazzy chords and progressions are beyond me at this point.P.S. If you're anywhere near NYC, we've gotta PLAY, man!
Comment by onlinedrumlessons — February 23, 2008 @ 4:12 pm
Hi, thanks for listening.A lot of my basic advice is wrapped up in a tutorial video I posted: that video ID is D16Egf419YYI think there's a rhythmic component, and articulation component, and a harmonic component--I'm sure you have the rhythmic part under control. That may be where people struggle most. Articulation is just getting your shorts and longs straight. And harmony is something you can study your whole life. You don't need more than a couple chords to get seriously funky though.
Comment by volvoxburger — February 23, 2008 @ 4:38 pm
Drummers love this tune. :DI sat in with some guys in the Seattle area a while a go and we closed the place down playing this tune, absolutely tore the roof off.I'm in the midwest, but I'll holler at you if I get out east.
Comment by volvoxburger — February 23, 2008 @ 4:41 pm
