It’s 2 AM. Long past last call. The evening is winding down. Everyone’s a little tired, a little buzzed, a little pensive, but happy to be warm and not entirely alone. The band goes to one last song.
This week I finally received the Garritan Jazz & Big Band. I was lucky enough to get in on their “group buy” sale at the last minute. This library has some fun, unique features, designed to coax a little bit of life out of sampled instruments. For instance, my favorite feature is the playable brushed snare stir: if you hold down the key, the stir keeps looping statically, but if you apply aftertouch, a stir sound with more pressure gets mixed in. This is a great idea, and very playable, and sounds surprisingly realistic. Some other nice features: control over the breathiness of wind instruments, key clicks, variable vibrato rate, and even samples of the player taking breaths between notes.
This sketch started with a bit of playing around with the soprano sax sound. I just recorded an improvised phrase with no metronome click and was dabbling with some of the aforementioned controls to hear what the effects were. I muted this and forgot about it as I loaded up the brushed drum kit. That snare stir immediately evoked a mood: a small club, late at night, the evening winding down. It demanded a slow tempo (60 BPM… clock ticking speed).
After setting that atmosphere and finding the right reverb, I knew I needed an upright bass. It’s funny how early experiences lodge themselves into your habits. I remember hearing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” on my transistor radio as a kid (yes, I actually had a transistor radio) and always loved that bass line. Those glissandi in tenths were just so moody and distinctive, and groovy. When I first started playing around with synths at music stores as an adolescent, when I encountered a fretless bass sound, I’d immediately start playing those tenths. Well, it appears I still do, since that’s what’s going on in this bass line, except without the glissandi. Just simple diatonic steps in mixolydian mode. Incidentally, here’s a bit of serendipity: I just looked up who played that bass line on “Wild Side”: a session player named Herbie Flowers. I happened to name this track “Anenome,” after some beautiful flowers Ally gave me recently. Spooky.
I recorded some trombone but I thought it sounded off and was about to throw it away. Ally insisted on hearing it before I trashed it and said she liked it. I played her the first sax solo as well (on its own). She asked if she could hear it over the rest of the music, even though it was in a different key, recorded at a much faster tempo, etc. To my surprise it not only worked, but now the trombone, which I thought was silly, made sense, in an odd sort of way. Slowing down the sax melody gave it a radically different character, and showed me a nice aspect of this sound library. Usually the sustained portion of sampled instruments is lifeless and pretty grating after a while. It can tend to subconsciously lead you to play mainly staccato passages. This sax sound, while it won’t fool a sax player, is pretty expressive, even for longer sustained notes. I went back in and improved the control over the vibrato, pitch bends, and amplitude (volume) shaping over phrases. I even added those breath sounds where appropriate.
After filling things in with some cymbal, kick, and piano, this sketch has a bit of a dramatic shape to it. It’s rough around the edges but I’m just happy to have done some more music after a long hiatus.
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