thisnameistaken

I went to see a jazz trio made up of Leeds grads last weekend, they were excellent. Bought my DB off a Leeds grad, he is excellent. Hell I know loads of Leeds grads and - sure - some are unbearable w***ers, but most are excellent musicians. They certainly smoke me in terms of overall musicianship, and I feel very humbled when I'm invited to play with them.

Que pasa pussycat? Wo-oh, wo-oh!

Our guitarist/singer comes up with all the lyrics and vocal melodies and he's very good at it. Usually my contribution is vocal harmonies, bass parts, middle 8s, overall structure, horn parts sometimes. I understand more about how music works than he does but he's got that creative spark that - if I'm honest - seems to have left me.

Bloody hell!

I usually start with a melody in my head and try to fill that idea out as much as I can (extending it, adding harmony/counterpoint, imagining a bass part sometimes) before I pick up instruments and think about chords and structure and so on. Also I find it helps to have words as early in the process as possible, because they can make a massive change if they turn up late and maybe even scupper the whole thing.

[quote name='mcnach' post='980918' date='Oct 7 2010, 08:22 PM']as for the "bare with me i'm a tad dim"... I see how that proposition may work with another type of person, but I refuse to get naked with you at least until we've been formally introduced. [/quote] I got an email the other day from my least-favourite customer's new underling, providing instruction and finally requesting that I lease with him if I am unshorn.

I can't say I've ever noticed the two woods sounding especially different, I prefer rosewood though purely because my fingers sweat a lot and glossy maple boards get sticky.

Thanks for all the advice everybody I will give that book a go. Currently I'm training with random charts and Spotify just to open up the fingerboard a bit and build confidence.

[quote name='Bilbo' post='984450' date='Oct 11 2010, 02:19 PM']If you can hear it or are required to play it and can't execute the phrases, you need to work on your technique.[/quote] Or you need to tell the composer to stop writing prog rock songs or he's out of the band.

[quote name='WalMan' post='984424' date='Oct 11 2010, 01:53 PM']Slapping at 100mph through every song because you can[/quote] Haha, you can only do 100mph? Weak.

[quote name='ironside1966' post='983984' date='Oct 11 2010, 01:10 AM']Why can’t people just say it as it is? They are happy doing what they are doing and can’t be bothered to lean any more instead of pretending it’s an artistic decision.[/quote] The way I see it time is a finite resource, and any time I spend learning to slap or completely re-working my perfectly adequate picking technique to make my thumb hover for no other reason than some guy I've never met said it was a good idea, is time wasted.

There can't be any harm in having good and versatile technique, so long as you don't have to give anything more important up to develop it I suppose. I've never been the fastest player around but people seem to like having me in their bands so I suppose 'technique' has never been a critical gig-losing attribute for me.

The Specials.

[quote name='pandathe3' post='974784' date='Oct 2 2010, 10:41 AM']And if you want as much control as the Q-Tron+ but want a smaller package, then you have the EBS BassIQ.[/quote] TBH I think the BassIQ is a totally different filter. It responds very differently to input, it's more like the classic DOD filters than a Q-Tron/MuTron feel. Very stiff and sudden rather than fluid and flexible like the Q-Tron. Of course sometimes you want that harder response, but I wouldn't compare that pedal to a Q-Tron at all.

So last winter I decided I should learn to play double bass so I could be a jazzer and avoid ever having to join a wedding band. I'm 36, I figure when I hit 40 (maybe earlier) I need to be able to play jazz or else it's going to be Mustang Sally every weekend for poor old Kev. I saw an ad on Gumtree last week from a guitarist in a similar boat to me, who is looking for jazz neophytes to play with, and we're going to get together and play some standards each week in private to see if we can help eachother improve. He says he listens mostly to Miles, Wes Montgomery and latin stuff, I listen mostly to Coltrane, Horace Silver, Mingus and hard bop stuff. Neither of us want to play '80s fusion. Any specific advice about what particular bits of harmony theory might be useful to concentrate on for a gig like this? Or advice generally about jazz walking / substitution / finding appropriate modes or scales for given chord types or changes? I'm not hot on theory I'm full of holes and it's something I'm hoping to patch through doing this. I am serious about it though.

[quote name='bubinga5' post='982025' date='Oct 8 2010, 09:01 PM']tis still killer [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yioVmqlt2Fk&NR=1"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yioVmqlt2Fk&NR=1[/url][/quote] It would be better if he didn't feel the need to slap EVERYTHING. I like the way there is the odd Level 42 song where he picks with his fingers and IIRC one where he plays fretless, just to give credence to fanboys who want to call him versatile.

If we're truly going to look like a forum of 40-somethings who weren't even cool when they were teenagers we will need to pull our socks up and start more Level 42 threads. Rush threads would also be satisfactory.

Wow, awesome.

Oh I don't know, I'd have to judge with my ear rather than any knowledge of what makes a song clever, wouldn't I? So I'd probably pick something that's actually really straightforward. I suppose 'God Only Knows' is an obviously complicated pop song with some unusual qualities, but I imagine we would get more out of it if you pick a song you're enthusiastic about.

[quote name='wombatboter' post='981407' date='Oct 8 2010, 11:27 AM']I'm going to see them at the end of the month over here in Belgium...[/quote] Don't forget to make a thread about it.

Try lowering the pickup. I had something like this on my Jazz recently after I changed the bridge - the action had lowered a little but not much, but it was enough for the front pickup to mess with the thicker strings in very weird ways when I played higher up the neck.

A guy I was recording with the other week was playing me a tune he'd been working on for another band while we were having a tea break, and it was obviously a Warwick on the recording. He thought I was a proper bass anorak when I said "Ooh that must be a Warwick", I was right though!

A lot of the old '60s soul, rocksteady and ska songs have prominent but easy bass lines that sound good on DB (since they were all using mutes and flatwounds anyway). There's a big Trojan Records double album on Spotify if you've got it, or look up bands like The Pioneers, Maytals, Paragons, Skatalites, Desmond Dekker, Alton Ellis, The Gaylads, Hopeton Lewis, Ken Boothe, Stranger Cole, etc.

[quote name='voxpop' post='977288' date='Oct 4 2010, 04:17 PM']Thank you Major for all the time and effort to up load all this info. After 15 years of playing bass I have final started to learn how to read music. I've printed off all your lessons and will, over the next decade, plough through them and master this wonderful instrument call bass. Thanks again.[/quote] +1 from me. I'm painfully slow on the reading but it's satisfying when it comes good. And the earlier theory lessons are fascinating - more of this stuff would be very welcome. One thing I would love to see (I don't know how sensible a suggestion this is...) would be a theory lesson that takes a popular song - an interesting one like a Brian Wilson or a Paul McCartney or a Jeff Lynne job - and dissects it and presents it in terms of how the bloody hell it works. I think this would be a good way to help people (well, me, certainly) understand the utility of some of the cleverer harmony stuff you're showing us. Do you think that would be possible?