Sungazer – Whisky and Mes [Bass Playthrough]

From “Adam Neely”. ( YouTube / Nebula ). Also Adam Neely 2.

Whisky and Mes is a combination of many influences, including Guayla music (music from Northern Ethiopia/Tigray/Eritrea), Irish Traditional music, Desert Blues, Jazz Big Band, and Fusion. We put a lot of effort into making the blend feel good to us, and find a coherent story to tell with such a wide palate of melodies, grooves and sounds.

For the nerds:

1. Gear

* I’m playing the Dingwall SP-1 in this one. I’m dig the classic P-bass “grunt” that it provides, but with a much more focused and even response across the neck than my beloved 2010 MIM Fender P-Bass.

* It’s being run through my Line 6 HX stomp and the Ampeg SVT-Pro amp with an OH Ampeg SVT 4×10 Impulse response, plus some fancy multi-band compression and saturation in Ableton. But yeah, basically just P-bass into Ampeg. Nothing better.

2. Influences

* The melody for the A and B sections is an Irish Trad jig called Out on the Ocean that we adapted into the quintuplet scheme. It fit’s pretty nicely, I think! It’s definitely slower than how it’s supposed to be played (and in Eb instead of D), but it’s a nice. Josh Plotner played Irish Flute and Uilleann pipes on the recording.

* The drum groove and some of the quintuplet syncopations in the A and B sections are meant to imitate some of the syncopations we were hearing in Guayla music, which is often quintuplet-based. It’s definitely our own spin on that stuff, though.

* Fun story, we were playing a gig in Belfast recently and ate at an Eritrean restaurant before the show. The restaurant was BLARING Guayla music the entire time. When we played Whisky and Mes later that night at the show, the tune felt 100 times better than any other time we played it before – all of our ideas flowed a lot more naturally. Good food and good music are sometimes the best warm up you can ask for! Especially since it was Guayla music in Ireland…what a fortunate combination!

3. Theory/Composition

* This is a quintuplet 4/4 groove, but it’s notated it 5/16 because it’s a lot easier to read for session musicians. We don’t work from sheet music, and often the only time we write the stuff down is so that other musicians can read it with limited rehearsal time. This works well, but there are a couple of awkward quirks (simple things like whole notes in 4/4 look awful). It still makes life easier in the long run, from our experience!

* At about 2/3rds the way through the piece, there’s a metric modulation, where the 2+1+2 sixteenth note grouping of the 5/16 is “morphed” into feeling like 3+2+3. Shawn came to me with this idea, and I thought that a good way of working with it and justifying it was to take quintuplet swing (3+2) offbeat vocabulary, and slowly start feeling it straighter and straighter. So the first time you hear the horn riff in the transition it’s slightly swung (quintuplets), and the second time it’s straight (sixteenth’s/eighths). The effect is like…double time. Kinda. Sorta. Technically 1.8 time. Don’t worry about it. Just feel it.

* A big challenge was to adopt the melody that I had written from 5/16 into a faster 4/4, and make it sound just as natural and inevitable. We hear the “Chorus” melody a total of 4 times, and it’s very different every time. The first time it’s in the bass, the second time it’s in 5/16 fully orchestrated, the third time it’s in a faster 4/4, and the fourth time it’s in a new key. Repeating the same thing over and over with internal variation is a great way to tell a musical story, but you have to find the right balance of novelty to similarity in order for it to work.