House Upon The Hill

I recorded this track in September 2014 prior to touring with RJ in support of Jools Holland. Playing this song to a soldout Royal Albert Hall is one of the proudest moments of my life. I’ll do a blog about that another time. The original recording was done with my 50s re-issue P bass through a Sansamp BDDI straight into the desk. We then re-amped into my Orange Terror head and Ampeg SVT 4×10. I got sent a demo version of the song the night before and put a few ideas down in my home studio. Pre-production is always worthwhile.

The main skeleton of the groove was already there, the G octave idea and the off beat Ebsus and Csus chords. My job was to fill in the gaps and add the flavour. I did this using some classic bass player tricks! In the verse I use some walk up/walk downs between the Gm and Cm chord. In verse 1 I outline a Gm arpeggio and in verse 2 move up chromatically from the flat third and down chromatically from the 5th. In the choruses I was asked to play longer lines to contrast with the more rhythmical verses. In bar 4 of the chorus I reference the intro with a C-Bb dotted quaver semiquaver lick. I added a nice walk down to follow the vocal melody in bar 6. For the breakdown I put in a little bass fill. I outline a Gm11 chord then walk down from the fourth/eleventh to the root. I’d been playing a lot of fretless prior to this recording and this is the kind of lick that works really well on fretless.The fill just fell out of my fingers when I went to play something. I liked it so kept it. In the outro I repeat the same lick an octave down. It stands out a bit less in the lower octave and stays out of the range of the vocal and guitar solo.

This version was recorded on the same bass (now with a jazz bass neck) through my sansamp then into Logic Pro X via my Mbox 2. I added a little compression and a slight a EQ bump at around 3-5k.

Thanks for reading I hope you enjoy the video and have a go at playing the song too. It’s great fun to play.