Chamber Music and the uBass

Big thanks to Dean at Ubass Appreciation Society for blogging about one of my latest Ubass experiences!

Playing Ubass with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra

The Bass Section of the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and me!

Hi,
One of my goals with this blog/site is to take my Ubasses to places you normally don’t see one!
Here’s a new experience for me and the Ubass 🙂
Besides blogging I do other stuff too 🙂 I work as a music teacher and ICT-pedagogy in a Swedish secondary school with an arts program (music, dance, theatre, and visual arts).
Among the highlights we give our music and dance students is a collaboration with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra that is based in our town. Since our hometown <a href=”http://www.orebro750.se/”turns 750 years in 2015 we decided to do a concert with songs that is either performed or composed by someone from here. (There is even a bass neck and head in the logo! 🙂

I had to (which wasn’t a sacrifice at all) chime in and play two songs on these concerts. One of the songs lend itself towards the Ubass. So I decided to play my trusty acoustic/electric on a jazz ballad. It is composed and arranged for orchestra by one of Sweden’s premiere jazz pianists and composers, Lars Jansson. The song is called Hilda’s smile. Below is a sneak peak of one of our performances of the song. It was great to play together with this wonderful orchestra once again. I have done it a couple of times before in different projects, but never before with a UBass. It was also nice to talk and hang with the nice fellows of the bass section. See pic above!

Ubass + Chamber orchestra = check 🙂

More of Lars Jansson’s music here!

More about the orchestra here!

Kill That Feedback

Great option if you experience feedback while playing your Ubass in a ”noisy/loud” environment! Big thanks to Mike Upton for the demo and Dean Tomasula for the blog post!

Quick link to YouTube videos!

M&M's LAH14 JimC — M&M’s Honky Tonk, Live @ Heart 2014

Here’s a quick link to my UBass related YouTube-videos!

[You can also find it om my About and Links and more pages]

/Magnus

New page to easily find DIY (do.it.yourself) posts

Hi,

At the moment there is only one DIY post at playubass.com
but there will be more soon!

I’m in the final stages of a new post and will with that post reveal a new series of post… 🙂

So stay tuned here and on the

Finally! The World Premiere of The Ubass Ambassadors and their first song ”Mr Z” is here!

Welcome to a world premiere!

The collaboration. I’m very happy to announce the first song by The Ubass Ambassadors, ”Mr Z”. A collaboration with fellow Kala Ubass Artist, Armin Alic!
I met Armin for the first time at the 2013 Frankfurt Musikmesse in Germany. He worked for Kala at the UBass booth. We quickly became friends and during his first visit to Sweden and my hometown in October 2014 we had really nice ”hangs”, talks and even managed to play/make some music together 🙂

My 2014 trip to the Musikmesse is documented in one of my Playubass newsletters!

The Song. It all started with a drum loop, a chord progression and then a little, if I may say so, catchy melody. We arranged the song together adding keyboard, synths, FXs and a guitar part. The melody was then recorded on UBass (two octaves) and synth. We also overdubbed the melody with our voices!

When Armin got back home to Germany he got a great idea! He said: -”Why not replace the drum loops with a real drummer!” What a great idea! Getting more real musicians adding their craft and colors is always a real plus. Armin’s drummer friend, Felix Engel, recorded a great drum part in his studio. We wanted even more and decided to add percussion too. Max Klaas, the percussionist of Armins band Royal Street Orchestra, was kind to lend us his great skills. This made the song even more alive and colorful!

This past fall I have done a short tour in Sweden. (Four shows celebrating the music of the great Gardestad brothers. Famous for writing lovely swedish pop music. I have a lesson on one of their songs on the video lessons page! Read more about this and my use of a solid body ubass in that show on my Facebook page.) In the band is my long time friend Fredrik Kjellgren on keyboards. We wanted to breath even more live into the song and Fredrik added really nice Rhodes and organ parts.

Now the song was ready! We started mixing and continued to collaborate through the internet. As well as audio we also filmed all the different musicians! To round it of Armin’s friend and the oud player for Royal Street Orchestra, Nikolaos Rondelis us with the audio mastering!

What you’re about to see and hear is the first song from…