New piece for bass guitar

[Sweep]

My first posts to this forum were connected with an audio generator I'd bought, as I needed some advice on cables.

I promised I'd post something about playing bass, as that's what this forum is for, so this is a link to my first recording with a bass guitar. I've played guitar for years, so learning bass has gone pretty quickly. It'll be interesting to hear what accomplished bass players say about this, though.

It's `Watching the Ducks Land,' and it's number 38 in the player on my website at [url="http://sweep.infinite9ths.com"]http://sweep.infinite9ths.com[/url]

`Watching the Ducks Land' was written after reading a passage from Mike Oldfield's autobiography about the pointlessness of a duck shoot he went on, and how much better it would have been to enjoy watching the ducks land on the water than to murder about a hundred of them and fill them so full of shot they weren't even eatable. Although I've used my more impressionistic style and not constructed the piece like something of Mike Oldfield's, I've played the bass like a guitar - I'm quite influenced by his approach to the instrument as well as by various jazz players.

I played the bass guitar through a Roland V-Synth XT, and as well as adding a particularly nice reverb the V-Synth also provides sound effects controllable from the bass. From the beginning until about two minutes 26 seconds all the sounds are the bass guitar and the V-Synths's filters, apart from a couple of wing-flutter sounds that are actual samples. All the bird calls and sound effects up to this point in the piece are the V-Synth triggered by the specific frequencies played on the bass.

From 2.27ish I've added electric guitar processed through the V-Synth, and some keyboards, plus additional samples of birds, but most of the piece is still the bass and the V-Synth effects. The ducks calls that come in later were all done by me using a duck caller (made in Indonesia, Fair Trade), and the water sounds were made by leaning over the bath next to a mic on a boom and swirling the water with my hand. I used a Lexicon MPX550 at this point, but all the earlier reverb in the piece was the V-Synth, apart from the keyboards, which use the reverb on my Technics KN750.