This is a bass guitar playthrough of TesseracT's 2013 album Altered State. It was recorded in one take. Not that it only took one try to get a decent take, that's for sure! There are many details to mention, but I'll try and keep it concise. I will fail to do so, but I'll try. LINKS TO SONG TIMES: There are annotations at the beginning of the video with links to the bass entrance of each song, for (understandably) impatient viewers. APOLOGY: For all of the words that pop up during the video. Not sure if that's annoying or not, just wanted to explain when certain things were happening (sped up through tuning sections, bass was taken out for a few seconds in some places to show the difference, etc). RECORDING: My setup is nothing special, even anti-special. I have a Greg Bennett Corsair 5-string bass, the finest instrument you can buy. For less then a month's rent. Even if your rent is cheap. I use a small Roland keyboard amp for my bass amp. I have a couple mediocre condenser mics that I use one of for this recording. The recording was made using a mix of the sound from the mic'd amp, and a DI signal through a small Behringer mixer to my computer. I use Mixcraft 6 as my DAW. I use medium picks, because that's what I found lying around. I have no experience with picks, and do not know what should be used for playing bass. The video was recorded separately, and manually lined up with the audio later (which is why there are spots where the audio is playing at normal speed while the video is forwarding through tuning sections, etc). THE STORY: This project took the whole summer of playing bass almost every day. I had, only a month or two before the album came out, acquired a cheap 5-string (still the one I use), and had noodled around a bit, but hadn't really practiced a lot or developed any real skill. This album became the conduit by which I learned how to play bass. It started out when TesseracT was releasing a few trailers before the album came out. I figured out the rhythm/pattern for one of the trailers (whichever one had the clip from Eclipse), and then later figured it out on bass. I was going to post just a short clip covering solely that trailer, but then the album stream was released, so I thinks to myself, "Well, I might as well learn the rest of the song, I've got the hard part down already!" Planning on making a video of me covering that song. Now, at this point, I had NO experience using a pick on bass, and only minimal experience elsewhere, just a little bit on mandolin, so during the sections with the rhythmic muted picking, I was just plucking the sounded notes (the repeating Ab riffs). At this point, I realized that that opening riff of Exile was amazing (after the slap opening section). The contrast of really aggressive attack in the guitars, but with a smooth and calm vocal line over it? Beautiful. It is still one of my favorite sections on the album for sure. So I thought I'd learn that little bit with a pick, just to recreate that effect. Now, this whole time I'm listening to the album over and over and over. When I was driving (and at the time I was driving a couple hours a day, commuting for some work), I was casually figuring out the rhythm of many sections, just tapping on the steering wheel and singing along with the notes. After some time, I realized that I had absorbed and internalized a large portion of the album this way. Sure, I was missing most of the transitions, and a lot of the notes and rhythms in my head weren't exact, but I began to figure out bits and pieces of the album on bass. At this point, I had it in my head to record videos of playthroughs of a couple of the suites, Of Reality and Of Mind. Matter and Energy just had sections that were way beyond my capabilities at the time. So I figured out what I could, and was focusing on just the inner suites. And then, along the way, as I began to learn some Lettuce! and StS bass parts on the side, I realized that I wanted to do the whole album. All of it. In one take. I don't know why. I still couldn't play parts of Proxy and Singularity, and my picking was horrendous for Exile and Eclipse, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Figuring out those last bits (looking at you, ending of Singularity!) took me a metric tonne of time, slowing it down in my DAW for days and days, getting one more note in the pattern in my head every 20 plays. But here we are. Is this perfect? Absolutely not, I make stupid mistakes in many songs (the one right at the beginning of Calabi-Yau I'm particularly fond/embarrassed of). But I feel that I have neared the total amount of time I'd like to put into this project, and would like to move on to other things for a while. All things considered, as a learning process for bass I feel it was a smashing success.

• published: 29 Aug 2013
• views: 1691