BlahBlahCafe - Jean-Michel Jarre forum

I've just subscribed to your Youtube channel Rfoshaug

I hardly listen to covers anymore, but I gave this one a try, and I have to say it's pretty good! Those soft "beep" sounds in the sequence give it a little more depth, and especially the first part of your solo is exellent! It's a great combination of the original and your own touch. I would almost recommend to give it a mastering session on analog tape, to give it the real "equinoxe feeling"
Good job, keep 'em going!

That's very excellently done

Now I just gotta ask, how the hell did you programm that bassline. It has been bugging quite a while, and now I just gotta know. Cause I tried it a few times and it didn't work. I just don't know how.

Ofcourse its wonderfull.!!!!

Subscribed, added to my favourites and voted. This track is awesome.

Firecobra22 wrote:Now I just gotta ask, how the hell did you programm that bassline. It has been bugging quite a while, and now I just gotta know. Cause I tried it a few times and it didn't work. I just don't know how.

Ofcourse its wonderfull.!!!!

For the bassline, I actually used 2 tracks on the M3's sequencer. Both track 4 and 5 are set to MIDI channel 4, so that notes and control changes recorded in either track will sound on both sounds that are selected for these tracks. I just turned down the volume of track 5 so that only the bass sound (which I programmed on the EXB-Radias expansion in the M3) is heard.

Then I recorded the notes of the bass line in track 4. No pitch bend or anything, just the notes, which are quantized to stay exactly in sync.

I then recorded the pitch bendings into track 5 while playing the song in "slow motion" at 40 bpm instead of the normal speed (70-something if i remember correctly - I'm not in front of my M3 at the moment) without quantizing to get the bends exactly as I wanted them to get that Equinoxe sound. Most pitch bends in the bass riff at the start are simple - if it is just after a lower note, I bend down to make the note "glide up" to the next note, and if the riff goes from a high note to a low one, I bend up for a moment to get it to glide down.

Once the bass riff settles into the standard bass line, I recorded a bend that goes down/up/down/up a few times in a very short time to get sort of a vibrato at the end of the longer notes in the bass line. I tried different solutions using an LFO to control this vibrato, but I think it sounded better when I did the bend manually. Once I had done that for 1 bar, I just repeated that bar for track 5 for all the parts of the song when this bass riff is heard. Of course, during the song, the bass riff changes a few times to an alternate bass line without bends, which is much simpler to do. But when the song returns to the final C minor at the end, I went back to the original "bendy" bass line, even though the alternate bass line was used during the entire improvisation sequence. This makes the song revert back to "Equinoxe mode" before ending after that little trip.

If you want, I can post the bass riff sequence played at 40 bpm which gives you a better chance to listen to how it's done.


As for the sound used on the improvisation as well as the riff where I just glide my hand across the keyboard, this sound is transposed 3 semitones up so that I actually play those riffs in A minor instead of C minor. This way I avoid having to use the black notes during those glides, as the C minor scale would require. Therefore the improvisation is played in A minor, G minor and D minor instead of C minor, A# minor and F minor.

By the way, the most difficult part of programming the bass line is that the entire bass riff is played off-beat, ie. played half a beat later or earlier that how I've always perceived it. When listening to it, try to identify the start of each bar and count 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4. Once the bass riff is over and the main melody starts, my counting always turns out to be wrong (the main melody starts exactly at "1", but my count is at 2.5 or something like that).

I actually recorded the bass riff into the sequencer the way I ("wrongly") perceive it, and then shifted the notes to get it in the correct place for the song to start. I think composing the entire bass riff and it being off-beat is quite cleverly done by Jarre, and is part of what makes it so characteristic and memorable.

That same off-beat playing is also done in Equinoxe 5 (which of course has the same basic bassline except for the fact that the non-bending bassline is used for the "verse" and the bending part is used in the "chorus", which is opposite from how it's done in Equinoxe 7). If you start counting 1-2-3-4...etc once Equinoxe 5 starts, you'll notice that the main melody doesn't start on 1 because the entire song starts off-beat.

congrats rfoshaug for JMJ:s attention! (as he mentions in the blog)

Congrats

Yep, what a honour. Congrats rfoshaug.

Thank you! I'm almost speechless, and quite surprised that Jarre himself has not only watched the video, but noticed it and commented on it on his blog. It is really nice of him to do so.

Very cool. I especially like the extended jam from 6:20 onward. Thanks for making that available for download.

Keep up the good work, rfoshaug!

rfoshaug wrote:Thank you! I'm almost speechless, and quite surprised that Jarre himself has not only watched the video, but noticed it and commented on it on his blog. It is really nice of him to do so.

Congratz!

I bet he wish he could play like that...