Bilbo

I broke my foot about 15 years ago and have a loose piece of bone floating around in there. When it moves, it hurts. I was on a gig when, for no apparent reason, the bone went walkies and I was overcome with most appalling pain and associated waves of nausea. Got through the gig but had to pack up on my knees. Fortunately, at that time I was driving an automatic otherwise I would have been screwed.

A bew bridge wouldn't break the bank in a worst case scenario and a lot of players replace it as a matter of course. I wouldn't see it as a problem in itself.

There a=is more than one direction you can go in as a player. The temptation is to get more and more technical and faster and faster but you can also go deeper. I played electric bass for about 28 years before I found the double bass and, in my late 40s, I knew I wasn't going to develop a monsterous technique so, instead, I have tried to get into thinking about the bass in a different way. As a consequence, strange things have happened. I occasionally do what Jazz bass players call 'walking bass solos', i.e. your featured solo consists solely of a walking line; straight quarter notes. When you are doing this, there is something zen-like about the space you can get into and there is no question that, by avoiding 16th notes and be-bop lines, you get deeper into the music. i guess what I am saying is that, wherever the instrument takes you, enjoy the journey. The more you play, the more it will reward you.

And here is a photograph of paint drying.....

I bought a soprano saxophone as B-stock. £225 or something mad. It was fine. My sax player played it and was gutted as he said it felt as good as his £2k horn

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Here is my entry for this month.[color=#333333]My interpretation of the image related to the idea that these soldiers were waiting for an attack from the enemy. I thought that 'the wait' would be felt very heavily by the people involved because they were surrounded by images of what would probably become of them; hence 'the wait' became 'The Weight'. I think the themes capture that idea[/color][/font] [url="https://soundcloud.com/robert-palmer-1/the-weight"]https://soundcloud.c...er-1/the-weight[/url]

The search for the answer to that question is generally referred to as 'your career'.

I have written my core piece, a kind of Adagio, but it has a few clinkers in it which I need to sort out before I transport to Cubase and start populating with Miroslav Philharmonik/Edirol samples. All a bit Gorecki!!

We are doing classic rock and don't want any hippes engineering it? Like the 400,000 who were at Woodstck watching Ten Years After, Hendrix, Canned Heat, Santana, Grateful Dead, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Johnny Winter, Blood Sweat and Tears etc etc. The first session I ever did with the BBC was engineered by a middle aged guy in a white lab coat. Sounded awersome.

[quote name='ras52' timestamp='1427970010' post='2736405'] I've just put on Wind and Wuthering (having got it to study for a classic rock project :-) ).... Eleventh Earl of Mar hits its stride and I have to say "Mike Rutherford!" [/quote] You are right. No-one ever mentions Mike. I guess it's the curse of prog.

[quote name='ezbass' timestamp='1427973987' post='2736488'] And Stravinsky apparently. [/quote] Bullsh*t - that was 'after the fact'. It's a Jaco lick.

Just to put some context on these challenges. 95% of the gigs I play are Jazz on double bass but there are a couple of function bands that I play with intermittently (as in, say, two or three gigs a year). I never listen to pop music. Whenever I get to the gig, I am given charts for at least a couple of tunes that I have never heard of, let alone heard. THe charts are 'A/// D/// E/// Fmaj////.....'. really vague with no idea of groove or feel. They count the tune in and I have a bar or so to get a handle on what everyone else is doing and making something happen. So far, no-one has ever died. The one that made me laugh recently was they pulled out 'It's All About The Bass' which I HAD heard OF but had never heard. I was 'featured' in a tune where I had absolutely no idea what it was supposed to sound like. In truth, this obsessive attention to detail can wrap us up in knots if we let it. Most lines break down into very few important notes surrounded by a lot of flubber. If in doubt, roll of the treble and 'thud' away!!! I have done whole gigs like this in the past

I am not particularly well versed in PIno's work but everything I have neard just makes me think he is a highly coimpetent journeyman rather than some sort of demi-God. Like Nathan East, David Hungate, Nail Jason etc. Great groove players, highly capable of delivering great lines at a moment's notice but, ultimately, anonymous. NB I have personally always struggled to divorce 'great' players from 'sh*t' material (James Jamerson is one of those guys who plays 'great' on what I consider, subjectively, to be some pretty awful stuff) and most of the acts listed above leave me cold.

Never 'got' The Stones. As for tickets, I wouldn't pay those prices to see ANYONE, even me!! Hope you have a great time, Blue.

The definition of genius in composition is the extent to which you can disguise that which you have stolen.

Woo-hoo! Big orchestral thing coming your way!! Boom!

Most of the Nova LP is on youtube.

I understand that the way this one works means it cannot be made ipad compatible (something to do with the touchscreen). NB I don't know sh*t.

I started with Sibelius and went to Musescore for a new computer. Found it all but unuseable by comparison!! Sibelius rocks. Worth every penny. I only wish I had more time to spend on it building up my composing 'chops'!

[quote name='ambient' timestamp='1427840331' post='2735044'] That's what I like about it, I'm having to score my solo bass tracks. [/quote]

Another small point: musicians are obsessed with what their playing is not. Audiences are more concerned with what it is.

I played one of these once. It had a graphite nut and sounded AWESOME as a result.

This is a complex issue. Firstly, we all spend our lives listening to music recorded in clinically perfect circumstances and then play gigs where the environment is less conducive. We rehearse in the same place week after week with the same gear and often 'in the round' and then, the first time we play anywhere, we have to deal with a new room, background noise, poor eye-lines, anxiety, self-talk etc etc. We have periods when we are hitting and othjers when we are not for any one of 1,000 reasons. How much individual practice do we do (I never do nearly enough). What I am saying is that often the cards are stacked against us. For Jazz musicians, add the fact that you are almost always making stuff up as you go along. It ain't going to be perfect every time. Analysis of a recording is useful but it is more useful to analyse a [i]series of gigs[/i] rather than one. Understanding the direction of travel is as important as a sample of one gig. Use the intelligence gained to inform your devellopment but don't beat yourself up, it can become counter productive as your confidence goes and your playing suffers as a result. In truth, we are all able to improve and recognising that fact soes not mean that what we are doing has no value. Being 'tight' is not the only approach and an over rehearsed band can be a turn off as much as a sloppy one.

Well done the squasage and assistant chipolatta. Now where's that picture?