Clearing up the sound
It's funny to think it's been 20 years since I picked up the bass guitar and thought " this is the instrument I not just want to play but have to play!" The feeling never strayed once I saw that bass sitting on a guitar stand at my Uncle Lynn's house one day. I had been playing violin for a few years before that, but I was slowly losing interest because it was challenging, and I really wanted to play the guitar. Seeing some of my friends playing and listening to hard rock and nu-metal was inspiring me to want to seek a different direction. I wanted to ROCK! I wanted to make something hard and heavy, but my uncle wasn't about that. He wanted to play "guitar music" as he would call it, something with some soul.
Lynn grew up in the 60's playing Rock & Roll and Blues in Houston. He played around the same time and in the same locations as one of the most notorious blues boogie-woogie rock bands, ZZ Top. He even went to the same high school as Billy Gibbons! They weren't best friends or anything, but he said they'd played on the same circuit in a venue called The Cellar there in Houston. He said lots of people were playing back then and it was the thing to do. They'd have "Battle of the Bands" he said, and people would be lined around the block to get in and see some of the top bands coming out in that time. Anyway, let's just say my uncle can play and he kind of inspired me to play the bass. We used to jam out for the family during barbeques back in the day, but lately we've been working on a collection of songs we want to make an album out of and start playing around Bandera.
For the past 5 years my uncle and I have been working up these songs I can only explain as "Folk Rock Blues" songs. We have this mix of clean yet bluesy guitar tone that's also twangy and very southern. I bring a thick low-end growl that has a nice mid-range and subtle highs on my 5-string bass. Lynn has a voice that is good for telling stories and that's pretty much what we do. This will be a good collection once we get all the kinks ironed out.
Take for instance, this week we recorded a set of 5 songs that I feel we are getting together very well and the tone overall was sounding very well except for one reason or another we picked up this loud and annoying ground hum sound that was coming from his amp. Now for those that do not know, a ground hum is a humming sound produced from an electrical current vibrating to certain frequencies and it makes your speakers hum really bad. It's not good for a recording. Needless to say, I was pretty frustrated at first trying to attenuate the frequency, but it wasn't working out that well. The other tone of the guitar was getting compromised, so I had to look into another alternative.
After exporting the isolated guitar track, I placed the track into Bandlab, a website that has a built-in mix editor for music and de-noised the track and came up with a much more pleasing sound. The dynamic effect seems to sense the overall extra noise that's being produced on the track, and it counteracts that frequency and cuts it out. It basically gets rid of the noise you don't want to hear. It is still far from perfect, but that's something my uncle isn't really concerned with, we just want to get to the point where we can put these songs out for someone to listen to and have a good demo of ourselves.
He is 72 years old, so getting the songs recorded is an important task to me not just because it's something I feel obligated to do, but it is something I really want to do. He deserves it in my eyes. He got disenchanted with the state of music in the 70's with Disco and Country & Western taking off, leaving the singer/songwriter and blues music relatively unwanted at venues where he was. So, he gave it up after a while, but when I saw how well he could play I kept encouraging him to keep playing with me and after he got over a writer's block stint in the early 2000's he started writing and rewriting songs and eventually we have managed to amass around 35 songs to work with, with some needing more work than others. The ideas are there, and he has written all the words down, so we practice every Sunday morning. With this latest session, and a new idea on how to clean up our overall tone I believe we are very close to having a good demo on our hands. Now the next step will be examining a venue like 11th St. Bar in Bandera or Jake's place and seeing if we can't sit-in on an open-mic and see what we sound like for the audience.
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