"The Pavilion (A Long Way Back)" from Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures

Fantastic song with a super catchy chorus and a great 6/8 groove from Josh Eppard. The bass line is amazing, lots of little fills that are mostly all different, showcasing Zach Cooper's creativity and skills. It was a ton of fun learning this one.

Also featured in this video for the first time is my new Fender Precision bass. I am quite happy with this new toy of mine ;)

You can get the transcription and tab for this on this page

"Love Protocol" from Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures

Well I've been neglecting this project for too long. It's been a crazy 2020 so far and 2019 was pretty wild for me also, but I have some more time now and will dedicate it to some Coheed covers. I also have some new ideas for what to do with this page so I might be changing things a little...

Anyway, Love Protocol is the 8th track of the 'Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures' album. I love how catchy this tune is, it always gets stuck in my head :)

Zach has a very cool distorted sound for this one, and he does a lot of little variations to the bass line and fills. Check out the video below, it's my first attempt at putting the tab in the video directly, but you can also find the PDF of the tab right here.

"Queen of the Dark" from Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures

The 6th track of the 'Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures' album. This one has a great groove and feel throughout, nice and slow but still driving forward.

Zach seems to be using some kind of octave pedal on his bass guitar. I tried to reproduce it as close as I could with my Line6 BassPodxt, but I think I really need to buy a proper octave pedal, because I'm not too happy with the results, specially on the low F#. It seems like the Pod just can't get a note so low. Oh well, to the music store!!

As usual, Zach does not repeat his fills, so it was a lot of fun figuring them all out :)

You can find the tab/transcription here.

"Lucky Stars" from Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures

The last track on the Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures album. It's a slow, mostly acoustic song, not complicated or fancy.

I think Zach might be playing an upright bass here, so to get as close as I could to that sound on an electric, I used my new Fender Mustang which has flat-wound strings set up.

You can find the tab here

"The Gutter" from Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures

What a great track this is!

Listen carefully and pay attention to how many sections this song has... There's quite a few and a lot of them only come around once, which is pretty awesome.

As usual, Zach is solid, and hardly ever repeats himself. I love that you can tell there is no copying and pasting of Zach's bass parts in the studio.

Of course I had to do this video with the Creature mask... :)

Oh yeah, tab is here.

"Toys" from Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures

Track 4 from "Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures". This is my favorite song off this new record, and there's a lot of amazing tunes to choose from! I'm not sure that I got all the fills down 100%, but either way Josh and Zach are doing some amazing things together on this song.

Other things I love about this song are the odd guitar noises and squeals that happen throughout, the bridge that suddenly changes harmony and gives a very sad or melancholy vibe, the extra bars at the end of the third pre-chorus and in the middle of the last chorus, and finally what sounds like a film reel spinning after the tape is all done at the end of the song. So good!

Check out the bass tab here.

More from the new album to come soon ;)