NOTE: this is specifically for musicians to play along with and is not a new Monster Mike Welch album, just to avoid any confusion.
The pandemic, am I right?
I’ve been making elaborate multitrack demos for years, and when musicians all lost the ability to safely play together, I started building up backing tracks that I’d be happy playing along with, with dynamics and correct feels and a sense of interaction, even if that interaction was planned out in advance. Some of these tracks became the basis of my Live and In Lockdown album, and some were the basis for live streaming shows for Can’t Stop The Blues or other web video projects. Every time I would post a video, I’d get at least a couple of musicians asking where I got my backing tracks. Here they are, reworked into (mostly) 12-bar forms for jamming, practicing, or performing over!
If you use these publicly, please give a shout out and a link to
monstermikewelch.bandcamp.com !
NOTES on SONGS
Each song includes two bars of count in (including any drum fills or pickups)
1. Eddie Taylor/Jimmy Reed Style March (Shuffle) in E (99bpm) I’m from New England, and the legacy of Sugar Ray and the Bluetones, Roomful of Blues, Ronnie Earl, and Duke Robillard dictates that this sort of shuffle is called a “march.” You may have heard it called a “lump,” or something else. Whatever it is, it’s the groove you hear on Jimmy Reed and Eddie Taylor records, and that Jimmie Vaughan turned into a lifestyle brand with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Pay attention to that “drone V” - when the shuffle pattern goes to the B chord, Jimmy Reed would leave the open A string to ring out instead of fretting it, and that’s a cool part of that feel.
2. B.B. King Style Slow Blues in C (64bpm) Dynamics! This is one of the reasons I started making my own backing tracks - I miss the response and conversation of playing with a real band, and static backing tracks feel like wallpaper to me. I would do this with a two-chorus opening solo; for the dynamic break in the second chorus, please check out B.B. King’s “Gambler’s Blues” from Blues is King, because 1) it’s perfect, and b) that’s what’s happening here. You could also listen to one of the versions of my song “I’m Gonna Move To Another Country” - of course, the one I consider definitive is the version on the Monster Mike Welch/Mike Ledbetter Right Place Right Time record. There’s a big dynamic drop off in the middle that builds back up. Explore the space!
3. Memphis Style Funky Soul Blues in Bb (83bpm) I love that classic “Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” bassline, so I, uh, appropriated it for my own song “Please.” This is a modified version of the groove I used for the Live and in Lockdown version of “Please,” only with straight ahead 12 bar changes.
4. Eddie Taylor/Jimmy Reed Style March (Shuffle) in A (115bpm) See the comments above re: “March.” Everything applies here, just faster and in a different key. Check out Eddie Taylor’s version of “Big Town Playboy” on the Floyd Jones/Eddie Taylor Masters of Modern Blues album - that’s the vibe.
5. Magic Sam Style West Side Blues in B (76 bpm) One of the many great things about Magic Sam is the way he played around with the space between major and minor keys in songs like “All Your Love” and “Easy Baby.” Undeniably, the main riff includes a big old B minor chord, but every other chord he plays is major. I included Sam’s idiosyncratic intro of THREE bars on the I, then V /IV /I because I love it so much. Also, it ends with a few bars of staying on the I chord.
6. T-Bone Walker Style Shuffle in G (145bpm) As straight ahead as jump blues gets, with a ii/V change and “oombah” piano. 6 minutes of this is a LOT of choruses, but it’s a style that I personally could use the practice in, so it works for me.
7. Chicago Style Hard Slow Blues in A (66 bpm) This is inspired by Otis Rush’s 70s output (it’s the basis of my recording of “Right Place Wrong Time” on Live and in Lockdown), but I could also hear Buddy Guy, Jimmy Johnson, or Luther Allison playing over this sort of thing. Unlike the other slow blues in this collection, there’s no quiet section here; there are dynamics, but that shit plows right ahead.
8. Freddie King Style The Stumble in E (122 bpm) I really tried to get the Cincinnati King Records vibe here - the rhythm section of Philip Paul and Bill Willis had a shuffle like no other. Two times through the head each at the beginning and end of the song, with a bunch of solo choruses in between.
9. 8 Bar Blues Ballad w/Bridge in Bb (65 bpm) I was thinking of B.B. King’s “Understand” from My Kind of Blues, some of the blues ballads on Sam Cooke’s Night Beat, or King Curtis’ Trouble in Mind. Late night, a little jazzy, a little churchy. There’s an introductory A section, and then the form is AABA AABA with a tag that repeats.
The A section:
Bb /Bb7 /Eb /Ebmin7 Ab7 /
Bb G7/C7 F7 /Bb Eb7/Bb (F7)
The B section (bridge):
Eb /Ebmin7 Ab7 /Bb Faug7 /Bb Bb7/
C7 / /F7 F#7 /F7 Faug7/
10. Albert Collins Style Texas Organ Shuffle in F (145 bpm) Albert Collins was a big fan of Jimmy McGriff records like “All About My Girl,” which is the vibe here.
11. Howlin’ Wolf Smokestack Lightnin’ Style Groove in E (145bpm) This does exactly what it says on the box. I tried to go for something similar to Wolf’s version, where the bass and drums seem to be feeling like (what most people play as) the third beat of the famous guitar line is the downbeat. It’s easy to play over the same way as you would anyway.
12. Otis Rush Style Slow Blues in D minor (64bpm) Clearly, this is heavily inspired by “Double Trouble,” but I didn’t include the triplet motif between verses, so you can play or sing whatever blues you want over it. I did put one of those sections after the very last verse, because Otis is my biggest influence and any chance to pay tribute is a chance I’ll take. This one allows you to build the dynamics in a similar way to the B.B. King style blues above.
THE PROCESS
I’m using a MacBook with Logic Pro X and a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 interface.
I’m not a drummer or a piano player, so the original seed for a lot of these was in Toontrack’s series of MIDI loops for their Superior Drummer and EZKeys software instrument plug ins. They have collections of specific blues loops that made a good starting point, but I had to do a lot of cutting/pasting/moving things around to turn them into song forms that felt at all right. I tweaked a lot of the eighth note shuffle subdivisions on the drums, for instance, to get the shuffles to sit where I wanted, and I had to create any dynamic shifts myself. When I couldn’t find loops I wanted to build on, I’d just build drum and keyboard parts in MIDI in Logic Pro X myself. That’s how I built all of the organ parts and a lot of the drum fills, for instance.
I played the bass and guitar parts myself, of course. The bass is a 1990s Danelectro Longhorn (with 1990s flat wound strings, and missing the bridge pickup) through the Bass Amp Designer plug in in Logic. For guitars, I used my Wilson Rose Singlecut, my modified Muddy Waters Telecaster with a Lollar neck humbucker, my Gretsch 5420T, or my blue Fender Stratocaster with Fralin pickups through a Barber Tone Press compressor into the interface with Scuffham S-Gear amp sim and GGD Zilla Cab speaker impulse response plug ins. The guitar strings were Curt Mangan 8.5-42 on every guitar except the Gretsch, which had 10.5-46.
Hope you enjoy! If you use these publicly, maybe give a shout out and a link to
monstermikewelch.bandcamp.com ?
released November 27, 2020