Rush - Freewill bass and pedals cover with guitar by James Lighter (Snakes and Arrows Live)

My first collab with James Lighter. I've enjoyed watching James' Rush content for quite a while now and when he suggested doing a cover together I thought it was a great idea. We threw around some ideas and arrived at Freewill as it's a classic and I think we both wanted to do a cover of this song for our channels.

This is a much loved Rush song from Permanent Waves and one of the early ones I got into. It was one of the small selection of songs I knew before seeing them play live on the Snakes And Arrows tour for the first time and I was really pleased that it was on the set. I suggested we play our cover to the version from this tour for that reason, but also because it's my favourite version of the song and I really like the slightly slower tempo (and it makes the fills a little easier at this speed :))!

The solo section is without doubt one of the most iconic bits of Rush music, and an example of what I consider their signature feature in songs - an instrumental section in the middle of the song where they just go crazy. I normally play this section with a couple of bits based on live recordings of Geddy and a couple of fills more similar to the studio ones. I feel very lucky to have seen them perform this minute of music live several times and will enjoy playing it thousands more times myself

Big thanks to James for doing the editing for this video (I adjusted the levels slightly for my video so the bass was higher in the mix, but the bulk of the work was done by James). It was a lot of fun to do this together and we would like to do more collaborations, so any suggestions feel free to leave a comment. Probably best to suggest stuff without too many synths or it could get harder for us to do though :)

Be sure to check out James' Youtube channel for loads of great Rush content, and more of that beautiful ES-355! Link:
   / @lighterentertainment  

Thanks for watching

My Gear used:

Fender Jazz bass Geddy Lee signature with Rotosound Swingbass 66 strings
Tech 21 Sansamp YYZ Pedal
Palmer PDI-05
Roland PK-5 pedals playing a Korg M1