Ray Brown’s Half Position F Blues Here’s a great excerpt from an old video called ‘Ray Brown Presents the Art of Playing the Bass’. Ray is talking about the importance of foundational skills and having solid sound and time in half position: for non-upright players, that’s the area between the open string and the third…
John Patitucci’s walking bass masterclass Here’s a great clip of upright and electric bass virtuoso demonstrating some foundational walking bass concepts during a clinic. In the video, he plays though the standard ‘Stella by Starlight’ several times – first unaccompanied, and then with guitarist Jay Azzolina – to illustrate the different concepts he uses when…
Don Blackman’s debut album (1982’s Don Blackman) is one of a handful of discs that falls into the category of ‘Records I Wish I’d Discovered 10 Years Earlier’, along with Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man, Pleasure’s Future Now, and Chaka Khan’s Naughty. Not only does Don Blackman feature forward-looking, genre-hopping compositions, a roll-call of…
What is it? It’s a flanger. It, well, flanges things, you know? Flangers belong to the same family of modulation effects as chorus and phaser. The Boss BF-2 was produced by the company between 1981 and 2002, after which it was replaced by the BF-3 pedal which is still in production today. What Does It…
Imagine my excitement in discovering Joe Dart’s Berklee College of Music bass clinic on YouTube; over 100 minutes of potential wisdom and grooves to steal! Now, imagine my disappointment in discovering that the whole thing had been mixed by the drummer’s right foot. But fear not, funk bass fans, for poor audio fidelity will not…
If there was one album that irreversibly changed the course of my bass playing at a pivotal point in my development, then it was Incognito’s Tribes, Scribes and Vibes (1992). My first term at music college was something of a rude awakening in that I started to realise the sheer volume of things I didn’t…
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