This is another track intended for the Baßtelstube release – which means, it’s for bass guitars.
The “bass” parts for the first two sections and the basic idea how the themes and the coda work had been in my head for about half a year – now I finally wrote it down.
Simply marked “1″ and “2″ in the score, both are typical 5-string basses (albeit the “1″ needs to have either 24 frets or a sixth string to go up to that G’). It works with the juxtaposition of a syncopated groove (in voice 2) and a ternary one (in voice 1). Preferrably, 1 is a fretless electric and 2 a fretted (maybe an acoustic) one?
There’s three sections: In section A (bar 1-8), 1 states a theme on top of the groove stated by 2. For section B (9-16), 1 plays the bass line (rhythmically resembling the theme from A), while 2 states a lead which is ryhtmically more oriented towards the groove from section A. All that culminates in the coda, with both basses providing full harmonies with double stops, and making use of my treasured tierce Picardie.
A few notes on the score:
- the parts for 2 in sections A and B should be played a little bit syncopated. For a distributed recording setup, it seems best that part 1 is recorded first and then provided to the artist recording 2.
- The last section (bar 17 onwards) is perfectly straight – however, the sequences of semiquavers (boy, that’s a nice word!) can be played with the offbeat ones ghosted just a tiny bit to give it just that little groove.
- some details in the score (staccato markings etc.) are still missing.
- the hollow square notes in bar 16 are harmonics.
- the grace notes at the beginnin of bar 5 are ghosts.
- Dynamic markings are there for a reason, even if it happens all in a rather narrow range (mp to f). In addition to that, consider also that in section A 1 plays lead and in section B 2 plays lead. This is especially important when the lead voice moves into a lower register (bar 10) – play that a little more pronounced in the lead voice (but that will happen automatically if the 1 part is available for recording 2).
The picture shows the name-giving Jenny, who recently discovered she has an uncanny preference for nerds.
And here’s the score, before I transferred it into Cubase:
