The Bass Geek

I had to score a video project this week, and it turned out a little bit harder than I thought. The video in question was a take-off on a soap opera, so I was already at a bit of a loss (the only experience I have are viewing a few episodes of “All My Children,” I think, after lunch in my fraternity house - the house mother watched it). I was also separated from my usual MIDI gear. I basically had to toss together some loops and add some effects in Soundtrack Pro with some help from Reason. Most of the music joined one scene to the next, but I inserted some sound effects under the action as well.

It gives me a lot more respect for folks who score television shows week in and out. I realize that some of the jobs have gone to music supervisors that find prerecorded songs to insert into shows (and then find more music to replace the original music on DVD releases), but this is still some hard work. I also couldn’t imagine doing this without digital tools like Soundtrack Pro, Sibelius or Reason. I’m sure that if I did this on a more regular basis, it’d be easier to come up with some ideas and plot them out in a better way. Still, I couldn’t have gotten by without the sketchpad ability (and the undo function) of these programs.

I REALLY wanted to use some fretless bass on the project - I don’t think I heard a cop show or drama in the late 80s and early 90s that didn’t have some kind of fretless bass licks underneath the action. A truly inspired era that was.

So a lot of the reaction to the new Amazon MP3 store seems to be that it’s good, but there’s still alot of room for improvement. They like the lack of DRM and the fact that it has more major label content than eMusic (I’ll leave it to the reader to make the qualitative judgment there), but the collection still seems a little small (2.3 million never seemed so small, did it?) and you still have to download software to use it (a pet peeve of mine; at least iTunes is a functional media player, not just a download assist widget - eMusic, I’m looking at you, too).

It may seem redundant to mention that the big news is that Amazon has finally entered the fray, but it’s worth repeating for one reason - their strong recommendation algorithms. Since Amazon is a trusted name in online sales, it’s going to act as one of the portals for people to find out about new music. The blogosphere and Pitchfork and so on and so forth will be there for those willing to do a little searching, but having Amazon there for the “normals” means it maintains its 800-pound gorilla status. Since I already have iTunes and eMusic accounts (and they haven’t pissed me off too much yet), I’m not sure how often I’ll venture to Amazon. Their inclusion of Righteous Babe songs instead of eMusic is interesting, and it points to recent defections from eMusic due to monetary considerations. It’s usually the also-rans that die before the leaders, though, so nothing really exciting is goig to happen until iTunes and Amazon are the only competitors. If and when that happens, it’ll be interesting to see what iTunes does with DRM.

Side note: did anybody know that Amazon sells musical instruments? I can’t imagine purchasing one from them (these things need be seen and felt in person, from my viewpoint, Stick notwithstanding - that’s just an exercise in faith on many levels), but it’s good to know I could have a MusicMan bass at my door in priority shipping time.