Bassline for Rush's "Freewill"

Hi again. This time I've taken advantage of my vacation time to select some demanding material for my advanced students to practice standard notation reading without thinking of techniques like slapping or tapping. Just plain fingerstyle. "Freewill" is an excellent piece since it has many meter changes and can be confusing if you're not used to that. Besides, it isn't as technically demanding as "YYZ", for instance, but it isn't piece o'cake either. I transcribed the bassline in its entirety and have it ready as a gift for my students (not the beginners, of course) for the time when classes start again. To me, this is one of the most complex "short" songs written by the guys from Toronto, and this video is intended as a support material for my students' work, although I don't plan to tell them about this (I want to see how clever they are). Also, I found the video very amusing to make because I didn't want to use my camera's live sound but my bass' signal recorded direct through my soundcard as I've already done before, but now I had to put the original Rush recording as well to play along with it. So I plugged my Rickenbacker into my practice amp and its line out to my PC soundcard. Used a media player for the song and recorded my performance along with it (and the video as well, of course). Then wrote down start/end times in the video and did some cut-paste-mix to make the original track, the direct audio recording of my performance and the video to match. Cool! The bass' sound isn't processed. The only effect applied was normalizing the final mix. Lots of mistakes as usual, but the ONLY one that really upsets me is the mess at 3:44. AARRGGH!! But I didn't want to take the risk of more takes that maybe would be worse than this (this was the second one, BTW). I hope that those of you interested on learning this cool piece find this effort useful.

YouTube | January 9, 2007

Tags:. .mix. .media. .line. .didnt. .since