Disquiet Junto 0181 Instrumental Dream

The Junto this week takes the idea of realising within music the dream of an instrument. It's quite a sweet idea, I think.

My favourite instrument is my Warwick bass but I've been neglecting it recently. The idea was to record a track in which the bass leads the other instruments. At first I was going to play a B minor seventh thing I've been playing on the guitar but it seemed wrong to use a riff from another instrument.

I was feeling a bit discouraged when suddenly I had this idea of a string melody looped over a breakbeat, like something from a solo Wu Tang album. So I quickly sat down and figured it out on the bass. Then I had the idea of some chords that could accompany it and imagined them played by an orchestra.

Do bass guitars dream of leading an orchestra? Mine did, so I used Ableton Live's convert-to-MIDI function to drive the Suite of orchestral samples to get a lush result.