[Rusty the Scoob]

I just finished Searching For The Sound and gained some really good insights on how to cover Phil...

What other books are out there that help understand the Dead's music? I'm not looking for chord charts, more like insight on how to capture the Phil vibe...

[wisedyes]

I think for Phil you might want to pick up a book on musical theory - Phil is a walking encyclopedia of it and is a very cerebral bass player. The one out there by Mark Levine is probably the most widely used one I know of.

Seriously, though, the best way to pick up the "vibe" of any player is to sit down, listen, play along and figure it out from a theoretical standpoint. What is the guy doing, why is he doing it and how does it fit? In Phil's case, that is where a strong theoretical base would be very helpful.

[playingdead]

A really interesting way to get a handle on what Phil did is to take a recording of any particular Dead song, and speed it up twice as fast. Now listen carefully to the bass line.

What you realize is that his bass lines are really very intricate melodies that stretch over the space of many, many bars. I discovered this listening to a version of Terrapin at 2X the speed years and years ago. Later, I read a quote from Garcia who had also noticed it ... he said "it's like a whale song or something." It's as if he digests the entire song structure of, say, Ramble On Rose, then devises a bass line that plays a melody over the whole thing that is like a regular guitar riff, then expands it to be the bass line for however many measures the song is. It's absolutely unique.

Really fascinating to listen for.

[Tennessee Jedi]

Never heard anyone say to SPEED something up to learn something...
Guess I like to take it a measure at a time...
I will say that I love the sound of 4 track tapes backwards and sped up.

[BuddhaG]

playingdead, I see what you are saying about speeding up to hear Phil's genius. Phil basslines do not typically have a start/end/repeat pattern to them. Depends on the show and how he was feeling but often his playing is symphonic and the ideas very complex and stretched out over a whole verse or whole song like you said. It would be interesting to listen to a Playin' or Dark Star sped up.

TJ, I also agree with you on taking things bar by bar - that's how you figure out his licks. But if you play it sped up you can hear the movements easier - in terms of the dynamics of his playing throughout the whole song. Listening at an increased pace you wouldn't get hung up on certain riffs but more of how he played with the feel of the song through its peaks and valleys, so to speak, like punctuation. Damn, I have no musical vocabulary. Hope that made sense.

[Rusty the Scoob]

This is some very cool info. Phil even mentions Jerry's realization in his book but not in that much detail...

Does anyone have a good software for playing things at doubletime? Windows Media Player kinda works but doesn't take it up an octave and I don't think it's a true double-time. It just sounds like Phil, but faster.

[Rev_Roach]

if you convert to wav you can use windows sound recorder (run: sndrec32). it will increase the pitch (1 octave) along with the speed

but if you're gonna do this often you probably should find a better way (something that doesnt make you convert, allows variable speedup instead of just doubling, pitch control, etc). has anyone used any software like that before?

[owL]

I use a program called Audacity. You can change the tempo of a song without it changing the pitch, and do lots of other stuff. Its a really good free program.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/