Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Netgrass Collaboration #3

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Lost Highway would be fun. Could leave it country or bluegrass it. I’ll start practicing my Freegrass licks!

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I think it’ll will be great with a high energy treatment!

Well Larry, I made about 10 recordings of me singing and they “suck”…man I hate singing out of D when we have the C chord thrown in! Don’t mind D when it stays within the major scale but with the flat 6 showing up in there I have a problem…I can sing the tenor there or the bass but flop around miserably on the lead.

Hugo you wanna take a stab at it or someone else? Listened to your Church Street Blues rendition and you have a nice voice…you a taker?

If no one wants to sing it then maybe we get another part thrown in there?

Oldhat

Well, you never know until you try, oldhat! One of the cool things about multi-tracking is we’re never locked into one idea. If no one wants to jump in with vocals, I can always remove sections and make it a short instrumental instead. That way we can move on to a new project with Hugo.

I cropped Cuckoo’s Nest to fit the breaks we’ve recorded and it’s still a respectable 3 minutes long. I say we wrap this one up and move on to something new.

http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/home.track.project?trackId=229873&projectId=35598

Sounds real good guys! Well done to everyone involved

Sounds good. I forgot the second mando break, I hadn’t listened for a bit. I like it, that’s good composition!

Hey Larry
Sounds good. Went to lay down a bass track the other day but can’t find the lead for my mixer to laptop - suspect it has been borrowed by one of my daughters. Will have another lead later in the week when I’m down at the cave and can put it down then, however don’t want to hold you up if you want to finish the project.

You know we’ve got no schedule around here, ozi. Do what you can when you’ve got time.

So who, besides Hugo and me, would like to work on a Lost Highway project?

Hey Larry
Finally put that bass track down. Ended up keeping it simple so as not to crash into the solos. Up to you if you want to try it in the mix and see if it helps. If not, just toss it!

Which Lost Highway are we talking about - Hank’s?

And what happened to Big Rig Blues? Still itching to do that one - been waiting for a base track to go up as soon as somebody decided how fast it could go :unamused:
I also seem to remember someone saying they’d have a solo down by Christmas. Guess what? Only 22 shopping days left … sure hope that solo is under the tree :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks, ozi! That is so much fuller and richer than my imitation bass track. http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/home.track.project?_refresher=0.98581&trackId=230825&projectId=35598#

I think we’re talking about Hank’s Lost Highway. That’s the only one I know, anyway.

Sounds good, glad to hear it helps with finished project. Interesting that I wasn’t sure how good the sound was when I listened to the track before I uploaded it. Didn’t seem to have that fullness of tone so maybe you have worked wonders!

Happy to be in the next one - like the idea of musos from 3 continents making music together :smiley: So as soon as you get a scratch track up with the tempo and feel you want I’ll try to get the bass track up, unless someone else wants it.

Nice bass track!

Thanks Mike - nothing fancy, just to let the lead players shine through!

By the way, I take back what I said about Big Rig Blues!
Although there is currently nothing on Larry’s Kompoz file for BRB, I just came across some tracks on my computer from Larry with guitar & vox that I must have downloaded a while ago. So I was sitting around waiting for something I already had :blush: (nothing wrong with my memory - but damn I hate getting old!).

It sounds good so I’ll work out a bass track and then see if there’s any interest in getting that one back up & happening.

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Thanks Mike - nothing fancy, just to let the lead players shine through!

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I filled in for a bass player last week who was out with surgery. Going over one of the songs, one of the guys asked if I could play the melody line up high during the outro. I said “That’s the first time anyone ever requested a bass solo from me, but it won’t be the first one I tried to stick one into a song” :smiley:

I stuck the last mix over on our netgrass page at Soundclick. Have a listen and move us up the charts!

http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=12031829


Ozi, I removed my White Freightliner (Big Rig) Blues scratch track because it’s copyrighted and since we weren’t actively working on it, I didn’t see any need to leave it hanging out there. I still have it on my hard drive.


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That’s the first time anyone ever requested a bass solo from me

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Never encourage a bass player!

I played around with lost highway a bit. If you go up tempo on it, it’s a pretty short tune. Anyone have thoughts on a feel they wanted for it?

Lost Highway is kind of slow. I wouldn’t mind juicing it up a bit. We could always fill it out with intrumental breaks or repeated verses. With harmony singing and a faster tempo, I think it could be 'grassed pretty easily.

Do you or Hugo want to engineer this project, MIke? My footprint is always too heavy because I’ve been playing engineer on all the previous ones.

I liked it relatively slow (I always wanted to go a little faster than the recording I listened to), but with heavier drive and but on the other hand I liked it pumped up in speed as well. Up tempo, it sounded a bit more generic. Hank did some songs brutally slow, which I think was a neat feature (Cold Cold Heart was sometimes just creeping). I think the slower speed with drive might be better if we can do enough to fill out the sound. The old recordings were pretty much Hank’s voice with some soft accompaniment. I was playing with doing it drop D with a D2 and such to make the sound richer. I dunno, there’s many ways we could go with it.

As far as engineering, I don’t mind doing it, but I typically won’t be as quick to turn things around as you have been. I keep expecting things to let up, but my year continues to be quite busy. Also, my tastes are probably a bit different than some, but you get what you pay for in my engineering :slight_smile: Hugo does a nice job with it too, so if he wants to do it, then that’s great.

Oh, and I’ll charge double what Larry charges.

If we go slow enough we might get into my dobro range. :smiley:

When I was saying up tempo, it was still slow for bluegrass. I am guessing I was somewhere between 185 and 190. Maybe we could make a few “feel” tracks to see what direction we wanna go with it?