Re: New Jazzer on the list

["Mark Smart" <mwsmart@insightbb.com>]

> hey jazzer, great to have you.  you use a rc-20 and a chili dog?!!!

Yeah. I hate to admit it, but the Chili Dog is the best
playing-bass-from-the-guitar device I've ever used. It does this better 
than
any guitar synth, better even than the VG-8, where there is a delay when 
you
use the pitch shifter. You can play walking bass lines at like 310 BPM and
it has no problem keeping up! And it costs $40! It does bounce octaves on
low notes sometimes, I'm figuring out ways around this. This is a really
unusual octave pedal, the 1-octave-down output does not sound like a square
wave like most octave pedals. I got curious and poked around on it with a
scope. I don't think the thing even HAS an envelope follower. I think they
are just multiplying the input audio signal by the octave and outputting 
it!
This has added benefits, however. The timbre of the octave is affected by
the timbre of the input signal. And it kind of sounds like an acoustic bass
if you use your imagination, which is perfect for what I do.
The tracking of the dynamics of the input is flawless. I can use this thing
for a romantic jazz ballad and it blends in very naturally.

>If you
> were a stick player I'd say we were separated at birth!

Maybe we were. I do play Stick a little bit. I have an '80s Ironwood
10-string that I play around with sometimes. I worked for a while on doing
jazz stuff on it, but ended up being really overwhelmed with having to
re-learn the whole fretboard. But if I do like the idea of the Stick for
jazz....I started figuring out how to do a walking bass + chords with one
hand and melody with the other. And I like all the close-voiced chords you
can play.

My Stick, unfortunately, has problems handling the humidity variations in
the Midwest!

>thanks for the
> peter erksine cd tip, I've been using funk breakbeats on my rc-20, but
I've
> been trying to find more jazz drums.

The Erskine disk is great! There is swing time at a bunch of different
tempos, plus bossa nova and a bunch of funk stuff. He was careful to 
include
time loops with no extra accents for looping. Of course, his time is solid
as a rock. Also, there are individual samples of several of his drum kits,
with velocity layers and, in some cases, right and left stickings.

I use those, plus a few loops I have sampled from CDs: Joe Morello's drum
intro from Take Five and Tony Williams' incredible cymbal playing on
"Footprints" from "Miles Smiles".

Mark Smart