New Video! Silent Night featuring Chris Welborn

12/22/2016 – A few weeks back in my blog posts, I mentioned that Michael Dimin and I did a jazz cover of a Jim Croce song for the holiday season. (That video is over on my YouTube channel if you haven’t seen it/heard it yet. Swing by and give it a listen).

And now I’m back with one last cover for the 2016 holiday season. This time, the very talented Chris Welborn and I recorded a bass-forward cover of Silent Night. Chris has the electric bass parts, and I’m playing the bowed double bass and cello parts. Yup…you read that right…cello. Enjoy. 🙂

Many thanks to my talented recording and guitar student, JB Hope, who engineered and produced this track. Chris used a Warwick 7 string bass into a Warwick LWA 1000 head direct to the recording interface. Chris uses Kalium strings.

The Rode NTK mic was used to capture the double bass parts. The double bass is an older Czech bass (currently believed to be a post-WW II Czech-built bass, but there is reason to suspect it is older than that according to a previous owner…the pedigree will be better determined someday). The bass is strung with Thomastik Spirocores, medium weight. The current bow is a Premiere Artist Model CF Bass Bow Bow with a German grip (My main bow, a pernambuco bow currently strung with black hair, broke and it is on the sidelines awaiting repair. The carbon fiber Premiere bow handles traveling much better than my previous bow, so it has taken over as the workhorse for now).

A pair of Rode NT5s were used on a stereo mount to capture the cello parts. The backstory on the cello; it is a solid carved Chinese cello body that I purchased as a young player and put back together over time. Meaning when I purchased it, I purchased a cello body with a nice finish, solid top, flame maple back and sides…but no strings, no tailpiece, nothing. It was a cello worth $1500 that was stripped down and being sold as a factory second because it needed a neck reset. I acquired it for $300..an ideal price for a young musician fresh out of college. However, this meant I had a lot of work to do over the next few paychecks…sanding down and fitting a bridge to it, buying and installing an endpin, getting a new cello case, fitting the pegs, taking care of the neck reset, buying a bow…everything. Thankfully, I worked at a music store, so my paycheck went a little further when I purchased parts. And I worked a trade show at one point during the rebuild, so I traded my time worked at the show for a new cello case. Currently, I’m using a J. Martin pernambuco bow. The strings are a Spirocore Chrome C, a Spirocore Chrome G, and Evah Pirazzi medium A and D strings.

Computer hardware used included a Tascam US-800 into a Mac Mini running Logic Pro X. Monitors used were the Mackie HR824 and Event 20/20 monitors.

All the images used in the video are courtesy of Stockvault.


And as always, your feedback is quite welcome.



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