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January Recap (Collaboration with local venue)

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January Recap (Collaboration with local venue)

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Walking bass development

The month of January for me was spent on working on my walking, in anticipation of my first ever gig with the Frederick Street Quartet.

why?

Techniques!

Walking bass explores the active use of arpeggios and even more importantly the stringing together of these shapes all throughout the neck.

This really elevated my mental map of the neck of my instrument, allowing me to more quickly fit into any kind of harmony

Collaboration

Organizing this night required communicating with the venue manager directly, we arranged back line, time slot, and our agreed rate to play. Above is a screenshot of a discussion about equipment for our gig at the venue

Best vehicle for personal development as a jazz musician

The act of playing live for an event like this is instrumental to applying the needed pressure to perform, this forces me to engage with the material like a real jazz musician, which improvises and adapts to the song. However the venue itself provides a low pressure environment independent of whatever we actually end up playing, which gives us all the confidence to risk take, try harder songs.

Networking with local venues,

Jazz gig

(screenshot conversations)

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Jazz gig

Once again we were back for the our now fully arranged residency at the pub we last played at in January. This time we had even less time to rehearse, meaning some repeats.

This showed me the importance of finding what songs click with our audience

A particular song we played had a lot more fanfare the first time around, this then meant we gave it a lot more room in the set and the success with the crowd was evident

Radio show

Rehearsals

Sam

Jazz (FSQ)

Riley

Purchased a new rig

cost efficiency

Purchased a new pedal

Broadening my tonal possibilities (distortion)

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I had the privilege to feature on a live BBC introducing with an artist I session for.

Me and Sam drove up to Lancashire BBC HQ to play two live songs.

Playing live on radio was a big exercise in control, volume, what I can or can't say, and the limitations of a small room.

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Target

Learn the above CASIOPEA song

Learn Beautiful Love in Fm

Metronome practice

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First I will listen thoroughly for key centre, if one isn't available online.

This is a jazz fusion track, so i'm expecting a lot of modal harmony, maybe a two chord progression using modal interchange.

starting with the head...
Its 2 sets of 2 triplets followed by 2 16ths notes
this is repeated twice
There's a held note at the end of each of the lines, first one is G, then the other is F
Knowing the genre, it's likely in the bebop scale for the intro
I test this by running a G and a B, then an F and am Ab
you can hear me trying this below to work out the intro harmony

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Slowing down the song on youtube to isolate the notes

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Slowing down the song on youtube to isolate the notes

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Using the playback speed setting I half sped it, confirming that its indeed a G7 type lick followed by the same lick but pointing to F7

In retrospect it's a very straightfoward dominant lick but it's given the extra spice with timing and speed.

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Rehearsing with Jack today

Core elements to explore are trialing my new tone with the AMPEG Scrambler, and a whole new bass for the project

I'm moving over from a Fender Jazz with roundwound strings to a Music Man stingray with Flatwounds

This has changed the frequency response significantly with my pedal, I've responded to this by increasing the treble knob on both the pedal and the bass EQ to amplify the bite of my tone.

This worked well with the amp and the room but It's liable to change and I need to keep ensuring I can maintain my presence within the mix, particularly my low end, I may be able to fix this with compression but I didn't have it with me at the time

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Today we have another rehearsal with Jack

It's much more about stage layout and planning the running order of the set, when we stop, any of kind of transitions from song to song.

Temporary Helplessness has a change in the baseline I made, motivated by the kick pattern Theo plays. This feels a lot more cohesive and has helped cleaned up what I'm playing during the verse.

I had an issue with tone again. This time it was the complete loss of the ability to hear myself whenever I used my Scrambler. This was once again due to a lack of any compression in my signal going into the Scrambler, and that coupled with the reduced volume of the D and G strings on my model of bass made for a frustrating experience.

I will absolutely be re-structuring my pedal board to include my compression and will be looking into my signal chain.

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Practicing with Riley today

practicing his tunes and a new one which required of me some more rigorous practice.

It features a Bossa like rhythm throughout with a heavily syncopated bassline at a medium-high tempo.

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Rehearsing with Phoebe today, and going over a new song, with a heavy focus on adapting her demos into a different ensemble. I came up with quite a few things during this practice. I contributed to a change in the accents we play at the end, adding more rhythmic dynamics in where I can.

Also used some pedals to create a particular effect with my Ostinato like bassline at the break of the song, I was proud of this set up although the execution could be better.

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Regular practice

I didn't get much time to practice today but I did pick up the instrument for a moment and I came up with an interesting Harmonic bass arrangement idea.

The harmony is Gmaj7/E -- Gmaj9 -- B

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Covering How High the moon and Beautiful love in detail

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Covering A Night in Tunisia in detail.

Today I dedicated my time to learning the full form of A Night in Tunisia

For this endeavor I used the Ela Fitzgerald version of the tune as a reference for form and to use a backing track, seeing as my ensemble features vocals I prefer using vocal led rendition to better play with the melody

I did learn the feel for the very interesting Latin/afro groove(depending on rendition) A section from other renditions

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Today was a long day of development with the Jack Valero project.

I had three bits of feedback from my MD I acted upon, and videoed above

Play out the final 3 chords in Chaos and Clarity

Increase widen the space in the bridge of Chaos and Clarity, i can accomplish this with some of my modulation (chorus/octave)

Clean up the execution of my ideas in This is a Nightmare, primarily in the last chorus

included above is my new tone for Chaos and Clarity

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Rehearsal Chaos and Clarity pedal changes.mov

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Admin and website development

I'm applying my colour theory into the website by changing the palette entirely from one set of colours to an Analogous range of Black shades.

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Today is the day of the jazz gig

I rehearsed at home with the band and we covered 5 new tunes for the night.

today was our only rehearsal, so we had to be strategic with how we used our time. This was a good exercise in streamlining our rehearsal.

We ended up cutting songs we found were weak from listening to previous performances, and tried constructing a set with a heavy emphasis on the second half in terms of dynamics

We later regretted this as the first set lacked a lot of movement

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March 25th Finances using Gocardless / Xero

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March 25th Finances using Gocardless / Xero

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Finance plans / applications to use

JULY 2024 - DECEMBER 2024 RATES

Signed

Aka label rate,

For a day I could charge £200

£100 for a rehearsal / travel day

£30 per diem

Travel covered by label

Payment terms 14 days

Unsigned

For a day i could charge £150 - negotiable to budget - £120 upfront

£75 for a rehearsal / travel day

£20 per diem

Travel covered by artist

Payment terms 30 days or 2 instalments (negotiable)

Payment plans on gocardless

Go to Xero, create an invoice, next step is going to Gocardless, send an invite for the payment plan, with the invoice number as reference, then every payment that comes through is deducted from the xero invoice.

Additionally I want to create a rates card using canva to send out to artists as a quick way to communicating my rates

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Creating Highlights

I made highlights today featuring any stories I've made with good content of artists I work for. Currently using any relevant photos I can get but will use a logo in the future for consistency

Changing my bio

I changed the formatting of my Instagram bio so that it better aligns with the user base's habits, such as a the fact no one clicks on the "read more" part of a bio, so ideally I need to fit everything into 3 lines for readability

Additionally i changed my display name, which acts as a searchable parameter, so that it includes "session musician" and some neater formatting. This better caters to the Instagram profile searching algorithm, and in my opinion, looks more professional

Making a tour post

I made a new post today including my tour announcement proper, and a photo from our biggest show of the previous tour. This is to act as a reminder and a little permanent marker on the profile to show i've done this.

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Got picked up from Brighton around 2

We had the evening to ourselves, so we chose to cook some dinner and relax with the crew in preparation for tomorrow

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10 am we had breakfast and I sorted out my pedal board, I took it all apart and re-assembled it with the power supply undernead the board to provide more space for the pedals

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Mostly hurried through the morning for the 10am check out at the hotel

Load in was the fastest it ever was, the lack of time for set up and sound check meant I wasn’t able to record anything for the load-in.

During soundcheck I requested a low-shelf on my in-ears. This helped counter-act a lot of my issues with the tinniness of the frequency response.

Did set up a tripod that captured the full set, had a few things go wrong that are easily avoided. I find that it’s key I run through a checklist of main things to ALWAYS do

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We departed the Village hotle in the morning
Upon arriving at the travel lodge we didn’t have much time before having to rush off to the venue

Set up today was fully videod , we managed to really dial in a new tone for chaos and clarity, a serious upgrade from our previous gigs and the pre-productions

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Things began really picking up in terms of physical and mental activity with each coming day. It became impossible to do daily roundups so I'm picking the best of the best and summarizing it here.

Tour taught me the importance of staying top of your game throughout it, It taught important lessons about networking with certain people, at certain times. But also it did show me that as a session musician, my involvement with the Jack Valero brand is non-essential, thus I could relax more around the green room shares that were happening quite often.

My best gig was surprisingly Carlisle, but It made me realize that I am more comfortable when the stage is quite clear and well thought out, I had the most back and forth mobility on stage of the entire tour.

Blackpool tower ended up being a lesson in Back line teching as we helped the rest of the lottery winners crew pack their stage so we could all go home sooner, me and Jake got the approval of Joel Perry, who runs a backline tech company in the UK and may end up getting in touch with us in the future.

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Carisle Bass Cam (Chaos and Clarity).mov