The Offspring - Have You Ever (Bass Cover)

Here's a bass cover of the song 'Have You Ever' by The Offspring.

I have been filming myself playing some songs on bass for nearly a week now and I've been uploading the videos to my TikTok profile, and decided to share some of them up here on 3Speak, and I'd like to expand out a bit and upload onto a few different platforms.

My original idea was to live stream using the app, but sadly you need 1,000 followers to be eligable to go live, before posting the first video I had 91 followers and in the last 7 uploads I've gone up to 106 which is pretty good.

The songs I upload are the ones I have learned and performed with the cover band I'm in, this one however is one I learned for the fun of and because I have always loved this song, it's the opening track to The Offsprings album Americana, which is by far one of my favourite albums of theirs which I have listen to since I was a kid.

Performance

I think I did a pretty good version of this song, but I did make some very minor mistakes, I could have stopped and started over, but I am and always will be of the mindset that when you're playing it's important to keep going after a mistake, rather than starting the song over.

One of the best things a musician can do is make mistakes, because if you're thrown off, but can get yourself back into position to continue the song that's more important than making the initial mistake itself, especially if you're playing live.

With these videos I've brought that mentality into the videos, however, I do go for a retake if I seriously mess something up, I'll only keep recording if we're above 95% haha

Requests

I'm really open to suggestions and want to expand my repertoire of songs, so if you have any ideas for something for me to learn, let me know. I like playing all sorts of music so any and all genres are welcome.

How I Record The Videos

I'm in the most basic setup ever, I record it from my phone and have to get the levels right between my amp and speakers playing the audio.

My first few videos went up without an issue, then I decided to crank it so I could really hear the song I was playing to for a few of my next recordings, which was a mistake as I got flagged and the videos were muted for copyright.

I deleted them and went through some trial and error to get the levels right once more so they weren't muted and this seems to be the sweet spot. The only problem I have encountered is I can't really hear the song too well over it, and can't listen to headphones or song wouldn't show up in the video.

To rectify this, I'm going to purchase a little audio interface so I can plug my bass into it and record directly through my pc, and work on the levels between the song and bass, while also having some options to tweak the sound and make it a bit warmer.

My phone is a good fix for now, and is allowing me to do what I want and to a decent quality, the microphone is pretty good on it and when listening through headphones the bass is really clear.

I do want to find the sweet spot between the songs level and the bass, because I would rather the song be a bit more prominant, and each song is different so there is plenty of trial and error that goes on still, from song to song.