This is a bassline that thoroughly intimidated me for most of my playing life. I've tried to learn it in the past, but I just could never get through the whole song. It's so smooth, and loaded with finesse, and nuance, and it's got such a loose groove to it, it's hard to get a handle on it. The unexpected rests and the notes he doesn't play are just as important as the ones he does... and he never plays anything the same way twice!
It took me a couple of weeks just to learn this song all the way through, and then a couple more to learn how to play it right. I made double-damn sure I had this song under my fingers before I even thought about recording it. Recording is another thing that's been intimidating to me, as well as making videos, so I figured as long as I'm already doing stuff that I find intimidating, I might as well have a go at those things too.
I constructed the backing track myself from the actual isolated tracks from the original song, minus the bass and vocal tracks.I came across a great wealth of Beatles songs broken down into their individual tracks on YouTube, so I just downloaded the video and put the tracks I needed back together in Audacity... It's the closest I'll ever get playing with the Beatles!
Of course YouTube blocked it the second I uploaded it, but I posted it as "unlisted", which you should still be able to view with the link. I'm sure you'll let me know if it doesn't work.
I didn't do a whole lot of mixing. I left the levels of the original tracks alone, thinking that they were probably where they were supposed to be. I didn't want to get into re-mixing the entire song (though listening to the video now, I kinda wish I tweaked the gain a little in spots on the guitar track).
On the engineering front, I put most of my work into matching McCartney's tone (a couple of week's worth... having too many options and an obsessive ear is not a good thing), and blending it into the mix. I'm not accustomed to having the bass quite so far back in the mix, but it's actually still more prominent than the original (this is supposed to showcase the bass, after all
).The video side of it was another thing altogether. This is my first time shooting a video with something other than my ipad, and I know even less about video editors than I do about DAWs. I'm not super crazy with the quality of the video, but I just bought the editing software this morning!
I spent most of the day just trying to figure out how to import my video files!Well, I think it's pretty good for my first attempt. I hope you all enjoy it!
