JoeEvans

[quote name='Dave Vader' timestamp='1428674313' post='2743676'] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]I have been stuck in a few bands over the last few years where just as it is starting to get interesting the leader shouts for everyone to stop and enthuses about one little bit, talks endlessly about where it should go, and where we think it could take us, or ask for certain cymbal fills to be chucked in. Which takes you out of the moment, and it all turns to sh*t.[/font][/color] [/quote] When I was playing in an improvising band, we had a rule that no-one was allow to talk about what we should play or how we should play it; any ideas had to be expressed by playing them and hoping that everyone else picked up on what you were trying to communicate...

The thing to remember about improvised music is that the bass player is very much in the driving seat. You control the key signature and chord changes; you control the drive and the groove; you are the interface between rhythm and harmony. If it gets boring, it's for you to fix... I played for some years in a band which was all improvised, with no tunes at all; we recorded a couple of albums like that as well as doing lots of gigs. When it was good, it was amazing - sometimes whole, fully-formed tunes would just come out; other times it was a bloody awful racket. From that experience, I would say that on the whole, improvising in a single key or a change back and forth between two keys is better than using a whole chord sequence; for the bass player, it's good to use very 'open' harmonies - root notes, fourths, fifths, seconds, sevenths - and not too many notes that define the scale too closely, so less thirds and sixths and less chromatic leading notes. That gives the other musicians more room for manoeuvre. Good to listen to some improvised music - Miles Davis' 'In a Silent Way' and 'Panthalassa' could be a starting point although lots of people hate that kind of jazz..

[url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Double-Neck-Acoustic-Electric-5-String-4-String-Bass-Guitar-yellow-with-Case-/191522562338?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c97a26122"]Here's an interesting thing... [/url] An acoustic bass guitar with two necks, one of them a four string bass and one a five string bass. I'm not entirely sure that the maker has thought this one through properly...

I guess looked at the other way around, if you gave a good luthier a double bass with no sound post, bridge or strings, then asked them to set it up with a particular set of strings on, the luthier would set it up, string it, twang it and tweak it until it sounded just so. No doubt by the end of that process, the exact spot where the sound post ended up would be different according to which strings were on there. So It might well be good to have an idea of the strings you want to use before you get the beast set up.

[quote name='Dad3353' timestamp='1428171494' post='2738818'] Music, in almost all contexts, is a question of contrasts. A loud passage only has value if there's a soft passage, and [i]vice versa[/i]. A fast part is balanced by a slower part. Silence is as important as notes, dynamiques is the name of the game. Permanent intensity becomes mundane, as the brain accepts it as the 'normal'. This balancing act is what differentiates 'good' music from bad. Overplaying (filling in all the gaps...) is, generally, counter-productive; all the life-breath is squeezed out. There is much to be said in favour of the pregnant pause. Silence is golden and all that. There are extremes, of course, as with all things, but the emotion is not in the 'fullness'; quite the opposite. YMMV. [/quote] Or, as Beavis and Butthead put it when critiquing Radiohead's 'Creep': "Why don't they have the bit that rocks all the way through?" "Because if they didn't have the bit that sucks, the bit that rocks wouldn't rock as much."

When in doubt, keep it simple, solid and groovy, and when you don't know what else to attend to, fixate on the kick drum. There's a deep funky undercurrent to lots of music that is created by the interaction between kick drum and bass - some notes you both play and some notes only one of you plays, and that interaction creates the groove. The notes you both play should be so tight that it sounds like a single instrument.

This is an especially middle-class one but my personal pet hate is when historians on TV or radio use the present tense. "And what happens here is that Henry the Eighth realises that he isn't going to get what he wants unless he divorces AGAIN..." etc. It's history - use the PAST TENSE! The clue is in the bloody name...

I saw this for sale on eBay: [url="http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tacoma-Thunderchief-bass-/291421681246?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276"]http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Tacoma-Thunderchief-bass-/291421681246?&_trksid=p2056016.l4276[/url] I've got one of these and I can confirm that the rumours are true - far and away the best ABG I've ever played... The price is a bit high on this one though, about twice what i paid for mine...

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]So many innuendos[/font][/color] [color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]So little time[/font][/color][/quote] Look, this is a sensible discussion about fingering. I'm having a problem achieving the effect I want and I'm after some tips: which fingers to use, how many fingers and so on. I really don't see how you could squeeze any innuendo out of that.

[quote][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]The pattern described would probably be played using a barre chord whereby the little finger (supported by the third) would bridge both the higher D and A siultaneously whilst the index finger would cover the low D.[/font][/color][/quote] Ah - ok. I tried that out but it felt very tough - is that something that you (or any other DB players) do as a matter of course?

Why not go the whole hog and break out the KY Jelly?

I've recently started to play the double bass after having played a fretless for years. There's a thing I've always done on fretless that I can't do on the double bass, but I'm sure I've heard people carrying it off in recordings, so I'm interested as to whether anyone has any suggestions (or even knows what I'm on about...) When playing a walking baseline with a triplet feel on fretless, I will sometimes play octave-fifth-root in a quick triplet sweep (e.g. D on the G string, A on the D string, D on the A string), with a rhythm like ba-ba-ba dum dum dum dum etc. The move is a little bit like the second to fourth notes of the baseline of 'Money' by Pink Floyd, only with the three descending notes played as triplets within a one note per beat line. Anyway, on a fretless I can finger this 4-3-1 and hold that more or less as a chord while sweeping one right hand finger down across the strings. On a double bass I can't do the left hand in the same way at all, but I hear people pulling something very like this off on various jazz recordings. Do I just need to practice more, or does anyone have any cunning tips as to how to achieve this effect?

A friend was at school with Alex James and told me that it's not actually his real name. I think he's called Dave really, but changed it because he felt uncomfortable having two Daves in the band. I wouldn't want to vouch for the truth of this in any way, I have to say, but there it is all the same.

I heard it said that if you mop a little bit of surgical spirit on your fingertips regularly it toughens them up. No idea if this is true, though.

Years ago I was playing a gig with my beloved cream Tokai Jazz copy, probably fairly drunk, and I noticed that the people at the front of the audience were really staring at my bass. I assumed that they must have been wondering what kind of rare and precious instrument could produce such an awesome sound, or perhaps gazing in astonishment at my amazing right hand skills. But then I looked down and saw that the bass was all spattered with blood because the end of one finger had kind of come to pieces without me properly noticing.

[size=4][font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]"[color=#000000]Now if someone has or can get hold of an original 50's Fender neck then you will be on to a real winner."[/color] [color=#000000]​And an original 50's Fender body to go with it.[/color][/font][/size]

[url="http://www.borderbiscuits.co.uk/our-biscuits/dark-chocolate-ginger/"]Borders Dark Chocolate Ginger biscuits. [/url] Other biscuit manufacturers should basically just give it up right now.

[quote name='discreet' timestamp='1426458349' post='2718286'] What if it's NOT a big budget gig? Would you put on a mediocre show and do half-assed rehearsals..? [/quote] Well, since you put it like that... But I might well try out new songs for a pub gig, maybe have someone depping without much rehearsal, possibly even let the drummer do a solo...

I would bump up the fee a bit for a big gig. Not ridiculously so, but if it's a big budget gig you need to put on a good show so you might be rehearsing extra thoroughly; you'd definitely need deps if someone was ill or whatever; any faintly dodgy bits of equipment will want to be replaced, even if it's only crackly leads or whatever. Ultimately, the fee any musician gets paid is not about how awesome they are, it's about how much money is changing hands for the event. Even if people are not there just to see you, you're contributing to a big piece of business; you will want to behave extra-professionally in that context, but you also ought to get paid a little bit more.

[quote name='bassace' timestamp='1426184706' post='2715433'] But it didn't do anything for his jazz, did it? [/quote] Who knows - it might have been even worse without the yoga!

Yehudi Menuhin did a lot of yoga and he got to play with Ravi Shankar, Astor Piazzolla, Benjamin Britten, Edward Elgar, William Walton and Wilhelm Furtwangler as well as hanging out with Stefan Grappelli in cool jazz clubs in Paris. So you won't go too far wrong there...

All this time I've been playing it (approximately) on a fretless bass without realising that he overdubbed the upper line!

I think I've got an unopened Theramin kit in the cupboard somewhere if anyone is seriously after one - it was supposed to be a good one too for technical reasons which I can't now remember. I'll dig around...