Jaco Pastorius - Continuum [Bass Cover]

This is the first Jaco tune I ever learned. It was beautiful then, it's beautiful now. If you go looking for tabs of this tune you will probably see my name on them. Please don't use them... they are mostly incorrect. I was 13 and the internet was a new thing. Sorry about that.

I'm not playing to the original track, I'm using a backing track from here:    • Jaco Pastorius - Continuum Bass Backing Tr...  . If it sounds like I'm playing over another bass part, it's because I am... that other part is also me. Read on.

I'm not using any effects here. I wanted to get that singing Jaco chorus tone, but chorus effects just weren't doing it for me. In an interview Jaco said he played the whole thing twice, so that's what I did to get the sound (which is why you see two angles for the first time in any video I've ever made!). No effects, no delay, nothing.

Audio comes from my bass POD in stereo, so I split each track into two mono tracks and only kept the left track from each one. Then I panned the first one at 60% left, and the second one at 60% right. Boom. Chorus. That's it. No other fancy nonsense -- just two tracks played over each other and panned a bit. I don't find it particularly difficult to play this tune one time, but I DO find it particularly difficult to play it twice exactly the same! It was a pain.

In Jaco's words:
"I played the whole tune twice, note for note—that's how I did it. Everybody thinks I've got all sorts of electronic gear, but I don't use any pedals, no electronics. It's all in my hands. But on that particular tune I played the whole tune note for note twice, solo and everything. That's just some unique stuff. I just wanted it to sound like a couple of guys singing.

When I did it, I didn't listen to the other track. Because there's no way to play something that close to the sound. If you play them both, you will cancel the other one out. Plus for intonation, I didn't listen to the first one, I just had to learn the whole thing. Every inflection of that piece of music, I learned back to front. Just went back and recorded the whole thing. I took the bass track off and just played with the rhythm section.

So when I put it together, it was just a surprise, because they were really close. See, there's no other way to do it. Well, there is, you can listen to them both, but they're so close, the intonation would definitely be out to lunch. That's the personality of the tune, because if it was a phase shifter, the vibrato would go [makes wild, erratic noise], whereas with this, the vibrato is going in waves. That's the magic of that tune. But seeing I'd played that tune so many times, there's parts when the vibrato's exact. Pure coincidence."

Bass is a 2001 Fender Jaco Tribute Jazz Bass
Pickups are Fender Custom 60's J-Bass Pickups
Strings are Dunlop Super Bright Steels (45-65-85-105)
Audio from a BassPOD (Amp 360 module, 12" speaker module)
Video from a Canon T5i, 50mm f/1.8 Lens.