While Pattern-Seeking Animals is working on album #3, here’s Dave Meros with a bass play-through video for “Elegant Vampires“ from Prehensile Tales.
Dave says: “This song’s arrangement hides the fact that it alternates between two time signatures, 7/8 and 4/4. To me that’s always an indicator of good writing. If an odd time signature is obvious or makes the song sound complicated, then the song probably should have been written in a time signature that compliments the melody better, and this song just glides from part to part effortlessly.
John suggested that I use a “bridge pickup“ type sound for this, and I was all over it. I love that sound and I love playing with that type of sound. I don’t often use that sound because it doesn’t always serve the song, but it really does work well here.
For the bass nerds out there, check out my solution to the typical long scale EB-3 neck dive (the short scale ones don’t dive nearly as much). The reason the bass is inherently unbalanced is not because of body lightness or headstock weight like a lot of people think. . .it happens because the upper horn doesn’t jut way out over the 12th fret like a Fender (or most other basses for that matter) to hook the strap to. So. . .I remembered how Steinberger solved that problem back in the day, and fashioned a piece of aluminum that gives me that position over the 12th fret to attach a strap.“
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