Here's a bass cover of the song 'Have You Ever' by The Offspring.
I have been filming myself playing some songs on bass for nearly a week now and I've been uploading the videos to my TikTok profile and decided to share some of them up here on 3Speak, and I'd like to expand out a bit, and upload onto a few different platforms.
My original idea was to live stream using the app, but sadly you need 1,000 followers to be eligible to go live, before posting the first video I had 91 followers, and in the last 7 uploads I've gone up to 106 which is pretty good.
The songs I upload are the ones I have learned and performed with the cover band I'm in, this one, however, is one I learned for the fun of it and because I have always loved this song, it's the opening track to The Offsprings album Americana, which is by far one of my favourite albums of theirs which I have listened to since I was a kid.
Performance
I think I did a pretty good version of this song, but I did make some mistakes, I could have stopped and started over, but I am and always will be of the mindset that when you're playing it's important to keep going after a mistake, rather than starting the song over.
One of the best things a musician can do is make mistakes, because if you're thrown off, but can get yourself back into position to continue the song that's more important than making the initial mistake itself, especially if you're playing live.
With these performances I've brought that mentality into the videos, however, I do go for a retake if I seriously mess something up, I'll only keep playing/ recording if we're above 90% haha
With this song, the hardest thing I found was the change in tempo for the bass, the first two bars are pretty flat out and then everything changes and that was the biggest roadblock I had while learning and playing this.
Requests
I'm really open to suggestions and want to expand my repertoire of songs, so if you have any ideas for something for me to learn, let me know. I like playing all sorts of music so any and all genres are welcome.
How I Record The Videos
I'm in the most basic setup ever, I record it from my phone and have to get the levels right between my amp and speakers playing the audio. I also balance my phone stacked on some boxes on my desk, I also can't get far enough away from the camera so need to angle myself. I need a selfie stick for my phone I think.
My first few videos went up without an issue, then I decided to crank the speakers so I could really hear the song I was playing to for a few of my next recordings, which was a mistake as I got flagged and the videos were muted for copyright.
I deleted them and went through some trial and error to get the levels right once more so they weren't muted and this seems to be the sweet spot. The only problem I have encountered is I can't really hear the song too well over playing the bass, and can't listen to headphones or the song wouldn't be heard in the video.
To rectify this, I'm going to purchase a little audio interface so I can plug my bass into it and record directly through my pc, and work on the levels between the song and bass, while also having some options to tweak the sound and make it a bit warmer.
My phone is a good fix for now, and is allowing me to do what I want and with a decent quality; the microphone is pretty good on it and when listening through headphones the bass is really clear.
I do want to find the sweet spot between the songs level and the bass, because I would rather the song be a bit more prominent, and each song is different so there is plenty of trial and error that goes on still, from song to song.
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