Song A' The Broadsworde Online Recordings at OurStage

All Bass All Blues

Cool jazz instrumental [cover of Miles Davis' All Blues] This is designed to showcase the fretless' unforced mwah effects more than anything else. But if it makes you relax a bit, would that hurt?

Freely available under the terms of this license but I have to pay BMI 0.085 USD per download (I hope Miles' heirs get a piece of that action ;-) ).

Lyrics

[N/A—it's an instrumental].

7th Heaven Or Bust

Rock instrumental in 7/4 time (2:14)
Freely available under the terms of this license.

Lyrics

[N/A—it's an instrumental]. I see the tune as a long journey compressed into less than three minutes, with peaks and valleys, high and low velocity, etc., finally sliding into the destination, a little beat up, perhaps, but there.

About the song

The changes just popped out of my fingers one day. The solo came out many years later around 3 AM after some 40 takes and I was half asleep. After I woke up, I decided it worked well enough. I don't know if I could ever play it again, though. :)

No amplifiers were involved in the recording. My tung-oiled all-alder Carvin DC127 with Super Slinkies and my custom Acacia fretless bass with D'Addario Chromes were plugged directly into my Digitech GNX-3 and recorded therein.

The drums are a built-in loop that was manually muted as necessary during the recording of that track. I had been thinking of recording a real 7/4 drum part but that track just grew on me.

All four stereo tracks were then uploaded to my GNU/Linux PC via analog playback through my M-Audio Delta 1010 soundcard/breakout box and captured as separate .wav files, which were then mixed into the final results using the free software package Ardour. The only track editing was to trim the count-ins after resynchronizing the tracks and panning—I don't like using punch-ins.

7th Heaven Or Bust 1.1

Rock instrumental in 7/4 time (2:14)
Freely available under the terms of this license.

This is an alternative mix to the original that replaces the original drum track with the one I had in mind all along that I was able to program and record using the free software package Hydrogen. I also used Audacity instead of Ardour to mix the tracks (recovering the original panning that got lost at some point) and export the various formats with embedded tags.