It’s happened to me more than once — I am trying to work on developing a new song, and instead I end up developing an old song. It’s so enticing! After all, the old song is no doubt farther along than the new one, why not just work on it instead?

Anyway, that’s how I arrived at re-releasing “Ain’t Too Bright“, one of my earlier songs (the first one I ever posted to Sound Cloud as it turns out). I was listening to it a while back and just really couldn’t take the sound of the bass part. The playing was OK (history has forgotten who actually played it), but the sound was horrible! I am sort of amazed that I felt that it was an acceptable tone at any point in the past, but evidently I did. Maybe I had my hands full trying to get the recording down. Maybe I figured I’d “fix it in post”.

I figured that what I was hearing was probably a MIDI bass, because I had done MIDI bass on a few other things around the same time. I figured it would be relatively easy to just open the project, find a better sounding MIDI bass, and bounce. Easy.

Well, I opened the project only to find that the bass part was an actual audio file of an actual bass, so I was limited to conventional tools to modify the sound. Although I’m getting better at sound engineering all the time, it is way beyond my abilities to take a bad sound and make a good one out of it. I tried a few things to improve the sound of the bass, but pretty soon concluded that I needed a new plan.

Just then I happened to learn about pitch correction in my DAW, and figured that since the software could tell the pitch of sounds in an audio file, it should be possible to work backward and create a MIDI file of the bass part, and then I would have free control over the sound. This turns out to be one of those cases where you discover something can be done, and then soon after discover that not only has someone actually done it, it’s basically a menu item in the software.

So, I created a MIDI file from the bass, and hey, I don’t mean to complain because it’s a miracle that you can do any of this stuff on a home computer, but unfortunately what I ended up with wasn’t usable. The notes were more or less correct, but the precise timing as well as some of the humanity of the audio file was literally lost in translation. To be honest, I’d be OK losing the humanity for the sake of getting this thing done, but to restore the timing of the performance would require so much tweaking that it was hardly easier than just re-recording the bass.

So, that’s what you have, a brand-new bass part. I’m pretty happy with it, though the actual bassist has asked not to be named, so it’s just Mystery Bassist from here on out. I did record the opening bass riff myself, so I’ll take credit (or blame) for it.

Ain’t Too Bright is as close as I’ve come to a love song, but it is what it is. The inspiration came from a terrific line from The Matrix:

Oracle: You’re cuter than I thought. I can see why she likes you.
Neo: Who?
Oracle: Not too bright, though.

After that, well, they tell you to write what you know, right?

So I hope you will enjoy this slightly revised version of “Ain’t Too Bright“, complete with a new bass part (and I took another pass at the percussion, too!)