 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Welcome to Featured Artists Live. Wow, this week on this show, we have a base focus, getting back to basics, so to speak. Very excited about this one. I must admit, I'm feeling a little sort of bad about this particular show. I haven't really prepared a lot in terms of, you know, a critique of the pieces of music or how helpful the bass is. There's not a lot for me to say in lots of circumstances other than, isn't this bass in this great piece of music great? But here and there, I hope to provide you with some insights as to how I think we can learn from these pieces of music and think about the bass in our own productions. By my own admission, I'm not a great bass player, nor am I, nor do I write music which often features the bass. However, when I hear it, I love it. When I hear other people do it, well, I love it. And that's what I've heard with the three songs that we're going to feature on today's show. Talking about the show, it's sponsored by DistroKid. And if you follow this link in the description down below and you release your music through DistroKid, you're going to get 7% off of their price, which is normally $19.95 or $99, whatever it is, per year, per year for an unlimited number of releases to all of your favorite places where you would buy music, normally yourself, Spotify, iTunes, Google, Play, whatever it's called, Amazon, all of the places where people buy and listen to music, you'll get released to there. And as I say, 7% off if you follow that link. And I get a little tiny bit from that as well, which is nice. Thank you very much. And advance helps the channel out very much indeed. We are going to be listening to three tracks in a moment. But first of all, I'd like to say hi to the awesome people in the live chat who are going to help me out today with their insights into the bass that they're hearing in these songs. We do, of course, have Mimo Japan in here. And we also have Doug Kidder in here as well. And we have Keonra Music in here, all three of which are admins, mods, whatever you want to call them, they're going to keep you in line. If you do get out of line, we have, I think I'm going to say this correctly, I better say it correctly, because it's one of the artists today. Papua Galora, nice. I think you're in the Philippines, right? Lovely country. Been there once myself, enjoyed it immensely. We have Kevin Parrott. Always nice to see you here, Kevin. We have Danny Gable. Always nice to see you, Danny. And Charlie. Now, Charlie, I just noticed in the chat just a moment ago that you're in Perth, just like me and just like Keonra. Wow. Small world, hey. Moving on. Nice to see you here, by the way, Charlie. You've been here before, haven't you? Yes, I recognize your name. Andrew, nice to see you here. Just one or two more. I think we have the produce aisle. Lauren is in here from the produce aisle. G'day. How you going? Nice to see you in here. So it's been a bit of a basic kind of a week for me. I'll tell you why. A little bit of self-promotion here for future videos. I am working on a video at the moment for this. I'll just try and get the cable, right? This is the new Minilab 3 from Arturia. A little keyboard about the size, I guess, footprint-wise of a laptop, probably. And it's got a lot of features on there, though. You've got your keys, of course. Wouldn't be much of a keyboard without the keys. You've got drum pads, which is very handy there. And you've got some controllers in there in terms of faders and rotary controls. You've got your touch. I'll try and do this this way up. Look, this is not a review. You can watch the video next week, okay? But anyway, while I was making a piece of music so that I could demonstrate me using this, I needed some bass guitar. And I reached out for a plugin I haven't used before. And I'll just... This video next week is not going to be about this plugin. I will try and review at some point. But let me know if any of you have used this at all. I'll just pull it up. Where's my little control for that? This one, Soul Bass. Soul Bass from UVI, okay? Look, I'm a sucker for pretty interfaces. I admit it, okay? I admit it. Hands in the air. But I tell you what, it doesn't let you down in sound whatsoever. It really is such a nice... I mean, there's lots of variations in the sound of the bass with it. But... And you've got this... I'll just pull it up again there. Sorry, wrong one. This one. We'll pull it up. You've got the bass sound, but you've also got this sort of extra layer in there as well, which is just sort of almost like a synthetic layer in there as well, which is very professional. The first track, you know normally, when I have guests on here, I make them read out the names to embarrass them because it's hard to read out the names. Well, I'm going to have to read out all the names today. And guess what? None of the songs on today's show are in the English language at all. So I'm going to have fun here. So the first song that we have here is called a Go-Go from an active member of the community from Poland. And his name is... Let me... I've been practicing this, okay? I've been practicing this. I'm going to get it right. It's Vojcek Stetsyshen. I think I did get it right. Let me know, Vojcek. Did I get it right? I hope so. I really hope so. Now, unlike some of the other shows, I'm going to sort of just give you some things to listen out for, okay, in terms of when you listen to this piece of music. As I said, I haven't got lots of huge amounts of input about the music today because it's all just about appreciation, us kicking back and appreciating it. But I will say with this one, I particularly did enjoy the bass production. So the sound of the bass, okay? I was listening to it yesterday with my subwoofer on here in the studio. And that's a usually a bit of a test for bass because if they haven't taken care of the low end, if you can't hear the low end with equipment like a subwoofer, good monitors or good headphones, it's easy to get that wrong. But this was nice. It's not boomy at all. Just sat down there, nice and solid. Really, really good. Now, listen out for the actual bass itself. It's an interesting bass line, but it still anchors the whole piece of music, okay, which I think is really important a lot of time for bass, okay? It also does a great job of creating dynamics. It gets kind of exciting at times, the bass here and there with some nice slides and things like that. And also listen out for the fact that the bass guitar in this piece of music does evolve. It's not the same all the way through. It's interesting things going on to tantalise your listening. Talking about listening, let's go ahead and listen to it. Wasn't that just wonderful? What a groove, hey? Well, I just, I mean, the whole piece of music, I really enjoyed it just so much in a world for me where I'm going to grumble a bit now, where music can seem so repetitive, so repetitive. And I don't know, there's not much music for music's sake these days. Sometimes it pierces me. I don't want to get too cynical. But let's just say I really did enjoy it that very much. It got me in a good mood, got me a bit chilled after my panic earlier on. Thanks for sticking with me here in the live chat, very much. I'm appreciate it. I've got to say earlier, by the way, we've got Eshaw Sax in here. I think you were saying earlier that you're unwell, that you're hanging in there and you're not feeling very well. So Eshaw, just hope you get better soon by the way. Lots of love for this piece in there as well. Producers all loved it. And you know, that's a good endorsement. We also have Eric in here who loved that piece as well. I'm not surprised. What a great piece of music. Thank you so much, Vojcek, for sending that in. And we're going to follow that up in a moment with some more awesome bass guitar after we have a little word from the sponsor or about the sponsor. Shameless promotion. So if you want to release your music via DistroKid, there's just a couple of things you need. First of all, the music itself. Here's mine in my door cakewalk, and I'm exporting it to an uncompressed WAV file for best results. Now the other thing you'll need is some artwork. I just grabbed an old photo, which I'd taken on the beach, chucked on some text here, and that's what I call art. Then I went over to DistroKid, and I just have to fill in this extra easy form. It's a no-brainer form. You get helped all the way through with little hints and things. You can't really do anything wrong. You just go ahead and confirm a few things about your music, and then you just have to actually upload the artwork and the song itself, and DistroKid takes care of the rest. It's going to send it out to all of the best platforms so that people can hear and buy your music. As Keonra rightly says, don't forget to help out by clicking on that like button if you're here in the live stream. That will let other people know they should join us over here. Let's hope we can hang in here. Now the next piece of music demonstrated to me that not only is the bass guitar, in this case bass guitar, because obviously there's lots of forms of bass, important in terms of the low end of the music, but let us not forget the part that it plays in terms of rhythm as well. And it's often very very connected, of course, as we have to mention, to what's happening with the drums. You don't have to. There's no have-to's in music. You don't have to tie the bass guitar in tightly with the drums. It's just that we've found over many, probably hundreds of years, but especially in recent decades that it does sound great if you do. Now one of the things I noticed rhythmically about this particular bass guitar piece was that it's played in a very tight way. So the rhythm is very good. And there's spaces in there. It's not always big long notes, but there's gaps in there. And it's a very important element of rhythm to have spaces as well. I think it works really, really well in this song coming up, which is another difficult to pronounce piece of music. It's called Moi Lutzi and the band is called Zai Wijia. I think I just butchered all of that. I just think it was all just all wrong, but it doesn't matter. It's okay. I'm not here for my pronunciation. Let's have a listen to this piece of music and listen out to the rhythmical elements, the space, the tightness, all of that good stuff. You know, I honestly didn't know that that track was also by Vojcik. So there you go. Must know something about producing bass to have caught my attention twice in one week. Really good. Some of the other things that I just wanted to note there, for those of you who are just starting out and putting bass lines in your song, you know, I think this was a demonstration of a nice balance. It wasn't overly complex, although it was quite mature and sophisticated even in some ways without being avant garde, you know, which is nice. That's a really nice little balance to have. I've also put on my notes here. Don't underestimate octaves. Bass players love their octaves, that low note up to the octave up. And they tend to follow it almost like a kick snare kind of a thing when they do that. That octave will often hit where the snare is hitting, okay? Just a little tip there. Don't be afraid to do that. It's another thing that's often used, but still sounds good. And also don't be afraid to use those high notes as well. And there was a little sort of different section in the middle there where kind of the whole mood of the thing went down into a different feel. And the bass player, you're actually the bass player with this? I'm not sure. The bass player was really exploring some of those high notes and playing around up there. A nice dynamic contrast as well, which was very, very nice indeed. I want to say something about this piece of music. And, you know, we can talk about all of these sort of technical aspects as well. By the way, before I go off on to this little thing, a little comment there, that, yeah, the fifth is always a nice compliment. Absolutely. You're right there, Eric, as well. The octave, the fifth. They're the easy ones to do. But yeah, always worth having this. So, yeah, we often talk in, about the technical aspects. But don't forget that the reason we're making music is to, is to move people emotionally. It's an emotional experience. And I think when people like me say things like that sometimes, it can be misunderstood when we're talking about emotion, man. The heavy stuff, you know, to move people's soul. Those are one kind of emotion. But you know, when you get someone's foot tapping, yeah, and you put a smile on their face, that's another emotion as well. That's what that piece of music was doing for me. I don't know what the lyrics meant. So I'm not getting any of that meaning from the lyrics, of course. But the music itself was fun. It was uplifting. It puts me in a really good mood to listen to that. So, yeah, really fun. And don't forget that there's, I know some members of the community, for example, make comedy music, yeah? Some people make music for, you know, for movies or for video games or what have you. Even if you're making a jingle for an advert, you're still moving people emotionally. You're emotionally trying to get them to part with their money and buy a product. But still an emotional experience. Keep that in mind, folks, when you're making music, because that's what we're really here for. Oh, sounds a little bit like a sermon, doesn't it? Let's hear from talking about making money. I know Lauren is loving this from the producer. Let's hear about DistroKid. If you do follow the link in the description down below, it's going to take you to a special page on DistroKid with this yellow banner at the top. That banner is letting you know that you're going to get a further 7% discount off your first year if you sign up here. And let's face it, it's already very cheap. If we scroll down, we can see that year's membership is $19.99 for an unlimited number of albums and songs. And so long as it's your own music, there are no extra charges and you get to keep all of the royalties from the various platforms. Platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Pandora, Amazon, Instagram, Tidal, iHut Radio, Deezer and more. But absolutely do make sure that you check out DistroKid if you are going to be releasing some music. Very easy to do, very cheap to do. Get your music out there, folks. Let the world hear it and then move on from these projects which have been stuck on your computer for years. Move on to the next project. It's a learning experience. Now, a little bit of a sort of a public health warning, I guess, for the next track. Only in the sense that I'm going to ask you probably to turn your monitoring up a little bit, whether you've got headphones or monitors or what have you, because this track has not been mastered yet. So it's kind of quiet, I think, compared to the last two. Okay, so if you want to really be able to hear what's happening with the bass in this one, then I would suggest that you probably should be reaching for that volume control just for a moment. I'll let you know when to turn it back down again as well. I believe that the artist is in the chat, and it's not for a check this time. Going by the name of, I think, I guess, Papoy Galore. The piece of music is called Doobie, I believe. I think, I hope I've got that correct. And I think Papoy Galore is from the Philippines, if I'm not mistaken. Very, very musical country, I have to say. If you're a musician in the Philippines, you have to be a good musician, because there's a lot of good musicians there. That was my feeling when I was there anyway. Very impressed. With this one, again, I'm not going to say that I've got any great insights into how we can learn from this. We can listen and enjoy it. We don't always have to be learning. I just think it was a good bass line. Although it's fairly simple, there's a little bit of playing with your ears a little bit, which I like it. I like it when piece of music play with my ears. So let's have a listen to this piece of music called Doobie. Okay, I don't want to hurt your ears. I really enjoyed that. One thing I liked about that is it's one of those, there's a lot of sort of repetition in that piece of music. Okay, particularly with the Skanky guitar. I'm going to call it Skanky guitar. Probably what was on there, a bit of phaser, maybe a flange or something like that going on there. And that was quite repetitive. And I think if the bass had also been too basic, then we might have run the risk of that song not being able to hold our attention. But I believe it was that movement in the bass there, which was holding us in, even though everything around it was fairly simple, straightforward. So I think it's a good example there of how you could use a bass guitar for that. Good fun to listen to. And for me, it's like one of those things that once your brain kind of focuses on that in on that bass, you could just listen to this piece of music just to enjoy the bass line, you know, walking bass line, you can't beat it sometimes, straightforward rhythm. There was some conversation in the chat about whether it should be shorter notes or longer notes. A little weighing in on that, maybe, maybe halfway, maybe a little bit shorter, I think. But yeah, really nice piece of music. I actually really enjoyed the vocals on that as well for some reason, just really suitable. The strings as was pointed out by the produce aisle as well around there. And also there was some brass going on in there as well. Interestingly, as Doug pointed out, Mark, there's alternative, but Papua was saying that the rest of the music is not normally kind of reggae-ish like this. So maybe that's why. There was a hint of, oh my God, I've forgotten now, you know, Blur, the band Blur, they went off and did a thing, right? The members of that band did another style of music. Let me know. Help me out here. What were they called? And they made something a bit similar to this. Go on. I'm going to hang around. I'm just going to sit here and wait for someone in the comments to help me out here. I'm not going to say another word to help me out. See, Pete Johns is there. He should know, shouldn't he? Gorillaz, that was it. He arrived to my rescue. Yes, there was something a little bit gorillaz about that as well. Just occurred to me there. Yeah, thank you, Wojcik as well. Glad to see you guys are on the ball. Do you know what? I can't believe it. It's 39 minutes into the show. We had a technical issue and we've already listened to all three songs. Normally I'd gone for hours and hours. I feel bad like I'm short changing you guys, but really good music today. I'm just going to quickly let you know what I was telling you before the internet let me down earlier because I didn't quite finish off what I was saying. Let me just share what I was telling you about this. Here we go. You know what I was talking about earlier. This thing here, this base plug-in that I've been using the last few days. Wojcik is going to quickly point out to you. It sounds really, really good. I don't want to go on about it. I'm not being sponsored by UVI for this, by the way, but if I remove the caption here, you probably can't see that. It's 59 euros, this base plug-in. It's really, really good. That's about $59 for those of you using US money, which is a good price for a very good sounding bass, I must say. Now, the only bad news I have for you on this base plug-in, which I've been using for all of the last 12 hours or so and I think it's amazing, is it uses iLock. Interesting. It's very divisive iLock. Well, it's not really divisive, is it? Everybody hates iLock, don't they? No one loves iLock, but we do like these people, Pete Johns, $412 Australia, right? But we do like the companies who make these products to be protected, of course. I just wanted to say quickly, though, that when iLock comes up, I'm waiting for the comments. Actually, let me wait. I'll get about a 10-second delay in the comments here. Let me just have a look. I'm waiting for it. I hate iLock. Someone's going to say, I hate iLock. They didn't, but you know you're all thinking it. The only thing I want to say about iLock is that I think people always think that you have to have a USB key that they identify that. I've got loads of products which are protected by iLock and I don't have an iLock key, including this one. There's like a software iLock. Now, there's some products occasionally where you do have to have the key. Maybe I've come across a couple, but just so you know, just so you know, it's probably, I know you hate iLock and you don't want to sign up. It's free, by the way. You don't have to pay for iLock, but I reckon this base plug-in's worth it. Don't let your prejudices against iLock stop you from having a really nice base plug-in. And Mimo says he has no problems with iLock. Yeah. Do you have the key, Mimo? Do you have the actual key? Or are you a software iLocker like I am? Is there such a thing as an iLocker? I'm waffling now. I need to get on with my Friday and continue making the video about this piece of hardware. We should be coming out next week, I guess. Should be coming out next week as long as I can pull it all together. Thank you so much for being here in the live chat. I will probably attempt to go and edit out the bit where I was offline for a few minutes there. Thank you, Restream, for letting me down once again. I should not be telling anyone any good things about you. I pay good money for you and you keep letting me down. Maybe it's time I went back to... What was the other one, Pete Johns? I don't know. The other one's Streamyard. Maybe I should go back to them. Maybe they're in stereophobie now. I don't know. I will see you next week with another show based around featured music from the community. Let me know either in the comments down below here or in the Facebook group about what you would like to see featured, what you would like to see a show be focused around. It's always good to get your input on these kinds of things. Thanks so much for joining me today. Love you guys. Love you being here. Love your input. Ever so helpful and I will see you in the...