CONSIDERABLY LESS THAN ALL ABOUT THAT BASS

A huge thank you to the generous Michael Sundlin for loaning me his lovely bass!

This was an opportunity to chart the boundless abyss that is my comprehensive lack of prowess as a bass player, failing utterly to play anything resembling the bass line I’d imagined for one of the tracks I’m working on. I was going for “Pixies meets the Flaming Lips”; what I achieved instead was “this guy only knows how to play guitar, so he tries to get by playing chords on the bass, which generally misses the point of the instrument”. Totally didn’t work.

But I did mess around with another (much slower) song, plunking along mostly on the root of each chord, and that actually worked pretty well. I’ll just get somebody else to play bass on that other track. Because as it turns out, I am not even remotely about that bass.

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"REVERSE" EFFECT PLUG-IN

I don’t usually endorse commercial products here, especially if I’m not being compensated for it (hint hint), but I do want to give a shout-out to the Reverse effect plug-in, especially since it’s only ten bucks… I was a bit skeptical if it would work, especially with virtual instruments, but I figured for that price it’d be worth the risk. And it indeed it was!

It’s pretty simple, of course— you plop it on a track, and it reverses the output, playing it backwards within a certain time frame. Here’s the promo video that explains what little there is to explian:

And best of all, it actually works! As far as I can tell, it processes virtual instrument signals in real time, without hiccuping or anything. And as dude points out in the video, you can even apply it to FX auxes to create reverse reverbs and what have you, which is super cool.

Maybe there’s been a plug-in like this in the past, and I just haven’t been aware of it— which would not be a shocking state of affairs. But I’ve wanted something like this for a long time, since as we all know, backwards stuff is cool, and when working with virtual instruments I’ve often had to go through the whole rigamarole of of bouncing a soundfile, re-importing it, flipping it around backwards, etc (and then not liking the results half the time anyway). This way I can hear results instantly in real time, and I can tweak the sound without having to re-export, re-import, and all that.

Pretty cool.

RELAXING YULE LOG-- BUT IT'S ALL GUITARS

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