I got to do something new yesterday: I recorded a couple of bass tracks in a professional recording studio. It was very, VERY cool!
I’m familiar with the concept of “studio musicians,” but I hadn’t really thought through how difficult it is to sit in a room by yourself, listen to a track that other instruments have already laid down, and then make a recording of you grooving along with them as if you were all in the room together. It was hard!
I’m used to locking on to the other musicians I play with via eye contact or watching their hands. That feedback is completely absent in the studio. All I had of other musicians was their playback in my headphones. It was hard to stay locked on with that through passages where the tempo or dynamics change. Instead of staying together with eye contact I had to just remember where the changes were and hope like crazy that I slowed down at the same rate. It took a lot of careful listening.
The thing that made it easier than playing live with a band, though, was that we could do several takes of a song and then blend the best parts of each take together to get one seamless, mistake-free track. And better than that: once we were satisfied that we had a clean foundation track, we recorded another track where I didn’t have to worry about getting it all mistake-free, but could add licks and fills everywhere I wanted — playing what was in my head rather than what was on the sheet music — and then insert those fills into the master track if we liked them and leave them out if we didn’t. The end result is a single track that sounds as though I’m a bass phenomenon who sat down one day and played a tasteful, inventive foundation for this song, stayed in the pocket the entire time, and did so flawlessly.
Having heard me live, one might suspect that I play one-handed with a single arthritic finger. Thank you, Craig, for your patience and skill in mixing me up to a performance worthy of 2 hands and 8 fingers.