the foot section is overshadowed by some sort of backing track of bass and drums? the actual playing of the drums is pretty simple. Watch his feet and then listen to what is coming out. Take away that backing track and you got not much on the feet sound. Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneously created songs and growing. I record about 300 full length cds a year. " life is a daring adventure or nothing at all" - helen keller
Walter, I think you're wrong about there being a backing track. The "bass" track is the bass-note run being played (semi-plucked, actually) by the guitarist. Either he's got a footpedal that's dropping it an octave or his amp is notably boosting the low end, or both. And I hear nothing in the drum track that doesn't correspond with what his feet are visibly doing in this live clip. He's doing a double thump at the appropriate moments, as can be seen from the side view.
I think it's fantastic live music, in other words. Very tight sound. Really nice vocals, too.
Edited to add: Actually, I take back one part of what I said. The track DOES begin with a backing track--a light percussion track. That's the very first sound we hear. You can see the harp player stomp on a box to kick it off. So everything that follows is being timed by the (live) players to go along with that. The guitar track comes in next. It doesn't sound notably bassy. But then, after cycling through four of those, the bottom end does get deeper. That may be--as I claim above--live drums, including the double thump, but it may be supplemented (and very craftily) by added bass guitar on the click track.
Last Edited by on Aug 19, 2012 4:15 AM
Here's why all this matters: if you track down their website (www.harpoonistaxemurderer.com) and poke around for a minute, you can find the following description of what the duo is doing:
"You’re not supposed to pull this off with only two people, but early on, Hall and Rogers made the choice to limit their sound to whatever they could play between them, using only their mouths, hands and feet. Shawn Hall provides soul-tinged vocals and distinctly dirty blues harp, while Matthew Rogers simultaneously pours out throbbing drum grooves and guitar licks with the kind of coordination that usually spells ‘novelty act.' For HAM, the multi-limb workout is key to a sound that has to be earned: at a typical live show, it takes a matter of minutes for the pair to be drenched in sweat. HAM uses no programming, no pre-recording, and no looping."
Ahem. Some of us--Walter and I, for example--truly do use no programming, pre-recording, or looping. So we're naturally curious about people with unusual abilities.
Because of the way this video is edited, you can plainly see that the harp player (the harpoonist, I guess) begins the whole thing by stomping on a box. That's the rhythm track.
I found the following live version of the song by raking through the videos in the "video" section of their band website. This is what the song sounds like live, with no backing track. I still say they've got a great sound. The harp player strikes me as a better singer than harp player, but he's not a bad harp player. His vocals really make the whole thing work. Thanks, Marcos, for bringing them to our attention. They certainly deserve it. A fair capsule description would be "The Black Keys &/or White Stripes with harp":
see him look down at 3:15 to see where the pedal is to turn off the cymbal that it ticking away all the way through the track? ---------- "Come on Brackett let's get changed"
Adam: Yes, I am too always interested in hearing people that play a 1 man band sound. There is no fighting the trend to use the current technologies to make 1 person sound like 3. The thing that comes right to mind for me is this- back in the 70's 1 guy would walk into clubs us bands were playing with a stack of records, turntable and speakers. He would tell the manager he would play any current and past hits for $100. They jumped on it most of the time and saved $200-400 dollars from having to pay a full band. Bottom line was more musicians were displaced by machines. This is sort of the theme of mankind. I feel no guilt in being able to physically play the drums guitar, harp, sing, keys, in real time, but to use machines to displace musicians doesn't sit well with me. Man has been hell bent on displacing music made on instruments in real time by humans since day one. The record, radio, jukebox, jam tracks, and all the new stuff guys experiment with here simply result in another step of removing live time music made on real instruments from our world. I know that is not the intent, but like mankind trying to eliminate man from as many processes of our culture as possible, this is also one.
I secured a contract with my school district and the neighboring one that I live in, to make thousands of cookies, bagels, and pizza dough balls, that they will sell in their school cafeterias. This summer I secured a State of Ohio Bakery License and Board of Health License for my commercial kitchen classroom. We are now officially The Smiling With Hope Bakery. If you are smiling you have hope and if your not you don't. My special education students will be working mighty hard this year! This endeavor also has gotten me to reach out to the other special education students at our school and the business teacher. We will need tons of help on the production line and the business class students are going to develop a website, marketing, a sign for our bakery, inventory development, etc.
This is all coming about because we use no machines other than mixers and oven, natural ingredients and no preservatives. Every cookie, bagel (plain, cinnamon raisin, blueberry) and pizza dough is handmade with pure ingredients. Currently all the food eaten in the school cafeterias was mass produced by men pushing buttons in far away factories having no actual contact with the food product and use artifical ingredients, preservatives. This is exciting in many ways but the connection I see to this thread is this. People are tiring of eating foods that are never touched by humans until they put it their mouths to eat and I believe our culture is tiring of mass produced in general. Schools use to make food onsite and it employed many people each day. Now 1 person steams, boils, the pre made frozen food and the work of 15 now is done by 1. It is a small movement, but make, sell, buy, local handmade products is on the rise(no pun intended :-) ). I have hopes this will also carry over to music in the form of going back to real time instruments and a step back in time so to speak to hands on sounds much like the make, buy, sell, local, handmade movement is going. Nothing will ever replace an acoustic sounding instrument, unamplified, played a few inches from the listener and my greatest learning moments from the blues greats came this way. Heck would you rather hear Little Walter on a video, someone imitating him, on a record, live in a club, or sitting in your living room with just a harp in his hand? I often wonder how I ended up being a special education teacher and am now realizing it came to me because it allows more spontaneous, back to the roots, real time, living than the current music world accepts. I can actually be more of a spontaneous artist (having freedom to create) in the world of "ultra conservative" schools than navigating the "creative/freedom/always looking for new" mantra the music world claims to be. Crazy! Walter ---------- walter tore's spontobeat - a real one man band and over 1 million spontaneou
Last Edited by on Aug 19, 2012 5:59 AM
Kudzu wrote: The harp player strikes me as a better singer than harp player
I'll roger that comment. I believe his mic is a 520dx and sounds a bit thin to me. IMHO, this tune is a good candidate for a Butterfield type of sound --- a bit more bottom and cleaner tone.
