What a year in the Berklee Bass Dept! As you will see in the video, so many great visiting artists, students, faculty, and administration.

Just a reminder on our “process”. During each residency, at the end, I usually bring the artist into my office to record for no more than 10-15 minutes, to a predefined tempo. They are not playing with any other track than the drum loop. I may call out keys or “concepts”, but they are free to play whatever they feel. We also try to capture video of these sessions. This goes on all year up until mid November, or sometimes as late as Dec 1st.
Then Vic and I will start assembling a song/track/soundtrack from these hours of recordings, looking for moments, keys, and styles, that might work together. We than start filling in parts with our basses, adding harmonies, doubling melodies, and rearranging our form as we go.

By approximately Dec 5-10 we have all that done and have settled on a form, with many of the parts there already. There is a looped drum-track throughout the process, and we are constantly mindful of what a great drum-track will bring as a kind of mortar to gel the sections together.

Also in early December I start going thru my Photos for the year and pulling out hundreds from various events, on campus “moments”, and travel thru the year. Many others also contribute photos. These are assembled in a slide show which is a bit shorter than the finished track, usually 7-11 minutes in length. Then we take the photos and music track and start assembling it all in Final Cut along with the video that we captured over the previous year. This is often like finding a needle in the haystack as we have hours and hours of video, various angles, and sometimes can’t remember who shot which video!

Fortunately, the week before we release is usually just when the semester ends so I start the assembly in South Carolina and barely leave my studio for a solid week, except to get some exercise, surf, or walk. Titles and Credits are also created. Lots of room for mistakes, by me, there.

Then, renderings are sent around to my “ears and eyes”; people I trust to make suggestions and make sure I am not leaving anything out, not hearing something, panning, levels, artifacts, etc….

After about 7-10 “final” versions we just have to put it to rest. It is an immense labor of love to celebrate our students, faculty, visiting artists, administration, and Berklee Bass.

This is our 12th annual production, starting a year after I got to Berklee. For the last 2 years I have said “this is the last one”, but by January 29th 2024, with the arrival of Pipoquinha, I couldn’t resist opening a ProTools session, and off to the races we went.

Next year look for the release of all 12 as an Album of Berklee Bass Holiday Classics! I mean it this time!! – Steve Bailey, Chair, Berklee Bass Department