Why you (and I) still need lessons Regardless of whether you’ve been playing bass for two weeks or two decades, there are always things about your playing that could do…
Why you (and I) still need lessons
Regardless of whether you’ve been playing bass for two weeks or two decades, there are always things about your playing that could do with improvement – the problem is that it’s very difficult to be truly objective about your playing while you’re in the act of playing; too much of our mental processing power is taken up with the task of playing music, so it’s tough to accurately critique yourself while making music.
One idea is to record your gigs and/or your practice – whilst this can be a useful tool in assessing your playing, it might not always be the best thing:
Your current gigs might not reflect the way that you’d like your playing to sound; if you’re looking to master improvising over changes, then recordings of you playing ‘Superstition’ or ‘Dancing Queen’ at last weekend’s wedding gig won’t be particularly relevant.
Recording your practice might be more indicative of what you’re working towards, but everyone is the best player in the world when they’re in their own room and there’s nobody else about. It’s also easy to kid yourself that everything in your practice sounds great (you might not even hear the things that need work).
So, what you need is a second pair of ears to give you feedback on your playing and direct your practice with the aim of reaching your musical goals. This doesn’t have to be a teacher in the traditional sense, it could be a ‘critical friend’ – a bandmate, other musician or another bass player who you trust to be objective about what your playing really sounds like.
One issue with asking this of a friend is that they might not want to be brutally honest about what you need to work on – they also might not actually hear any areas for improvement either; the best option is an experienced teacher who has no other agenda other than helping you to improve your playing.
It should be noted that even after 18 years of playing the bass and almost a decade of teaching I still try to take lessons whenever I can; there’s nothing more powerful than the occasional reality check to get rid of any musical complacency that might have set in.
Want to know how to tell a bass Jedi from a snake oil salesman? Better Bass Practice contains straightforward advice on how to find the right teacher for you and how to structure your practice routine to get the most out of lessons.
Perfect Electric Bass Posture? Is there such thing as the perfect posture for playing bass? This article aims to provide you with practical advice for improving the way that you…
Perfect Electric Bass Posture?
Is there such thing as the perfect posture for playing bass? This article aims to provide you with practical advice for improving the way that you sit and/or stand with the bass, regardless of what style(s) of music you might be playing.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a doctor or physical therapist, nor do I claim to be one. Any suggestions towards specific movements, exercise routines, alternative therapies or diets are based on personal experience and may not be suitable for everybody; please consult a qualified medical professional before making any significant lifestyle changes.
The following are some ideas that I’ve arrived at over the last 18 years of playing the bass and roughly a decade of teaching; I’m pretty badly constructed from a physical point of view and have had numerous back problems and other soft tissue injuries over the years including tendonitis, so I’ve put a fair amount of time and effort into optimising my posture and movements for playing bass (and life in general).
Whilst it’s not generally top of most bassist’s to-do lists, posture is the first essential element of interacting with the instrument and it comes before technique; the physical aspect of playing the bass is often taken for granted (if not ignored completely) by many players and teachers.
This video gives a brief rundown of the seated and standing postures outlined in this post:
New Kid in Town
The main issue when discussing posture is that the electric bass has only been around for 67-odd years and, as such, we haven’t quite reached a consensus on the best way(s) to play it – contrast this with more elderly instruments, like violin or piano, which have well-established teaching methodologies and definite guidelines for best practice that have been refined over hundreds of years. If you look at five different bassists that you’re aiming to emulate, chances are that you’ll see a huge amount of variation between them in their stance, strap height, neck angle and hand position.
First port of call is realising that playing the bass is a fundamentally unnatural and asymmetrical task for your body to perform – we’re placing a load of between three and five kilos on one shoulder for an extended period of time. Playing will always be a compromise between what is natural or comfortable for your body and what is necessary to get around the instrument in a relaxed, musical fashion. No one particular posture is perfect – all have pros and cons – but some make more sense than others.
Most of us have to deal with the fact that we sit down to practice but are forced to stand up when it comes to gigs – sitting on a gig basically out of the question unless you’re in a theatre pit or you happen to be Anthony Jackson. Because of this, we need to make sure that our sitting and standing postures are complementary rather than contradictory, otherwise we’re sending our body mixed messages about how to play and our practice time will have been wasted.
If you’re looking for more top postural tips and advice on how to improve the quality of your movement to enhance your playing and reduce the risk of injury, then take a look at Better Bass Practice, which contains practical, actionable advice on how to get the most out of your practice time and maximise your musical development.
Your Brain Is Rotten (and how to fix it) January. The month where you take a long, hard look at your life and promise yourself that this year you’ll finally…
Your Brain Is Rotten (and how to fix it)
January. The month where you take a long, hard look at your life and promise yourself that this year you’ll finally sort everything out. For me, the main focus of my January life-purge is my practice routine – or, more accurately, the distinct lack thereof.
Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to really make the most of the time that I spend at the instrument; I had a lightbulb moment when listening to a podcast and the interviewee said something along these lines (I can’t find the episode in question to be able to provide a verbatim quote, but still…):
“Things like maths or foreign languages are like apps that we ‘install’ in order to increase our knowledge or improve our skill set in a given area. Most people spend all of their time and effort on installing or upgrading their apps instead of attending to their operating system, which is how they run their brains.”
Jackpot. How can I expect to get the greatest possible benefit from practising when my brain is perpetually distracted? Why have I been focusing on upgrading my mental ‘apps’ when my operating system is full of bugs?
If you also feel perpetually overwhelmed, or that your attention is fragmented, if you struggle to concentrate, or are always ‘busy’ but never seem to get anything done, then this is for you:
The Myth of Multitasking
We’ve been led to believe that the only way to cope with the relentless demands of modern life is to do lots of things at the same time, and the proliferation of smartphones and tablets has allowed us to be able to chip away at our never-ending to-do lists regardless of where we are or what the time is.
Over time, the ability to be permanently connected has gradually morphed into a necessity. Many of us have become habituated to permanent digital stimulation to the point where one device is not enough; we browse multiple internet tabs while watching TV, we can’t make it through a film or a concert without checking our phone – the hyperconnected life has left us incapable of being alone with nothing but our own thoughts for company.
Here’s the inconvenient neurological truth: multitasking is bad for you. Whilst it provides the illusion that you’re being efficient and productive, the fact of the matter is that you’re actually just doing two (or more) things badly at the same time.
Want to fix your rotten brain and improve the quality of your attention? The Better Bass Practice ebook contains proven strategies to help you improve your levels of focus and make sure that you’re not a slave to your digital devices.
Learning How To Learn Learning a new skill can be a daunting task, especially if you’re pushed for time – which, let’s face it, we all are. The good news…
Learning How To Learn
Learning a new skill can be a daunting task, especially if you’re pushed for time – which, let’s face it, we all are. The good news is that there’s a straightforward, repeatable process for skill acquisition that works regardless of whether you want to learn to juggle, cook or play decent walking bass.
Let’s stick with the last of those items; I was raised on a solid diet of classic rock, singer-songwriters and classical music – basically all the genres that don’t swing – which meant that developing the skills necessary to play jazz with any sort of competence has been (and continues to be) something of an uphill struggle.
It turns out that the solution to learning anything effectively is actually about learning how to steal.
Steal From The Best
To outline the process of assimilating walking bass vocabulary from a pro, I’ve enlisted the help of John Patitucci (I’m fairly sure that he’s completed jazz on expert mode).
Important note: This process can be used to learn anything musical (or, actually, anything non-musical, too). If you’re averse to jazz then you can still get results from applying the method to any style of music that you’re learning. What we’re actually doing is:
Modelling a professional by transcribing their playing in a given context
Analysing their strategy in order to tease out the underlying concepts
Creating an etude that succinctly incorporates the methods of a master musician
Imitating these phrases until they become ingrained in our playing
Building new vocabulary based on the previously learned phrases
Here’s how I used the process of transcription to teach myself about walking bass concepts and develop my own vocabulary:
The source material was this John Patitucci masterclass – I’m guessing from hair/jumper combo that it’s from the 1990s:
JP discusses different approaches to walking through standards, playing ‘Stella by Starlight’ (he later plays through ‘Alone Together’) and mentions some key concepts in playing effective walking bass in both a 2-feel and playing 4 notes to the bar.
What Did I Do?
1. Transcribed 5 choruses of John Patitucci walking on ‘Stella’
The actual transcription process was quite straightforward thanks to the setting of the clinic – it’s just bass and guitar, so there’s no piano or drum kit to obscure the low end. The audio quality is also pretty good compared to many recordings from the 1950s where it’s often difficult to accurately isolate the pitches of a walking bass line. Other must-hear recordings with a similar duo lineup include Jim Hall & Ron Carter Alone Together and – one of my favourite albums ever – Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden Beyond The Missouri Sky
The transcription reveals that JP plays some changes differently as the tune progresses choruses; bar 12 of the form is outlined as Gm7 – C7 in the head, then Bbm7 – Eb7 for solos (as per the changes in most real books).
What’s a transcription graph? This is a transcription graph:
This is something that I’ve stolen from saxophonist David Liebman (there’s a pdf kicking about on the interweb detailing his very intensive transcription process). Aligning the choruses vertically makes it easy to spot phrases that appear multiple times as the tune progresses.
3. Analysed the harmonic content of the lines
Each note was labelled according to its function relating to the harmony – either a chord tone, scalar approach note or chromatic approach. Some notes have dual functions, where they are both chord tones and act as an approach note into the next bar.
4. Highlighted phrases common to multiple choruses (‘licks’)
Any phrases that had similar harmonic content were highlighted to easily spot JP’s favourite walking bass licks; I opted for the rather attractive hue that Sibelius calls ‘salmon’ to make things stand out:
5. Created composite choruses
I copied and pasted the most frequently occuring line for each successive bar of the tune in order to create a composite walking bass etude that features the essential elements of John Patitucci’s walking bass concepts – one chorus of a 2-feel, another with ‘regular’ walking bass.
Some octave adjustment of pitches was necessary in order to preserve the contour of the lines and make things feel less ‘cut and paste’.
So here you have it – 2 choruses of small, easily digestible fragments that have been distilled from a larger pool of source material:
Memorise the etude. I’d suggest learning this in 12 keys, but few people ever bother to do that. Personally, I’d rather transpose it into 3 or 4 keys and then…
7. Apply to other tunes
Write out etudes based on this one for other tunes in your repertoire
8. Write your own variations
As you play through the lines, you might find that your ears suggest other routes for navigating the harmony; write them down and create your own ‘licktionary’.
September 2017 marked 30 years since the untimely death of Jaco Pastorius, the self-proclaimed ‘greatest bass player of all time’ who completely revolutionised not only the instrument itself but also…
September 2017 marked 30 years since the untimely death of Jaco Pastorius, the self-proclaimed ‘greatest bass player of all time’ who completely revolutionised not only the instrument itself but also the way that it was played – Jaco pioneered the fretless bass and helped to make the electric bass a more legitimate jazz instrument (this may or may not be a terrible thing, depending on your point of view).
So why is everyone still talking about Jaco 30 years after his death? The fact is that he has influenced every single prominent electric bass player that has come through in the ‘post-jaco’ era; it doesn’t matter who you’re into – Pino Palladino, Mark King, Me’Shell N’degeocello, Gary Willis, John Patitucci, Marcus Miller, Will Lee, Richard Bona, Flea, Laurence Cottle, Stu Hamm – all of these great players have stolen a ton of stuff from Jaco. In fact, even if you’re keen on more modern players then Jaco is still relevant, as his influence can be clearly heard in the playing of Evan Marien, Joe Dart (Vulfpeck), Michael League (Snarky Puppy) and Hadrien Feraud.
What made Jaco So Great?
In order to understand why Jaco’s playing had such a profound impact on the history of the instrument we’re going to dig into his first commercial recording as a sideman, R&B guitarist Little Beaver’s ‘I Can Dig It Baby’, which was released in 1974, before Jaco’s infamous debut solo record, his appearance on Pat Metheny’s ‘Bright Size Life’ or Weather Report’s ‘Black Market’.
This wasn’t Jaco’s first recorded outing as such, he appeared on a record released under Paul Bley’s improvising artists label, originally titled Pastorius/Metheny/Ditmas/Bley (now widely referred to as ‘Jaco’) on which he can be heard playing some utterly ridiculous things in a not particularly accessible electronic free jazz setting. ‘I Can Dig It Baby’ represents Jaco’s first recording that would reach the ears of most mainstream listeners and allows us to study the key elements of his unique style in the context of a 6 minute pop song.
The credit for bass on ‘I Can Dig It Baby’ went to Nelson ‘Jocko’ Padron, but after a handful of notes it’s clear who’s in charge of the low end. What is most significant about Jaco’s recording debut is that it clearly demonstrates that he was a fully formed musician with a unique voice at the age of 22 or 23, which is an extremely rare thing. By examining the transcription of Jaco’s part on ‘I Can Dig It Baby’ we can isolate the fundamental elements of his style that would become so influential in years to come – it’s as if Jaco left us clues as to what he was going to unleash in the future as his career progressed.
5 essential ‘Jaco-isms’
1. Outlining Chords Using Harmonics
Bar 2 of the tune (Jaco’s fourth note of the piece) features a double stop harmonic which outlines the Bm7 chord. Harmonics don’t seem particularly out of the ordinary to us in the present day, but if we go back 30 years the story was very different; although Jaco doesn’t get sole credit for ‘inventing’ the harmonic vocabulary that we have nowadays he was definitely a pioneer of using both natural and false harmonics in order to expand the bass’ ability to convey extended harmony – Jaco totally changed the game with tracks like ‘A Portrait of Tracy’ and ‘Okonkole Y Trompa’ from his self-titled debut, and even managed to integrate them in a singer-songwriter context on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Coyote’.
Voicings like which combine fretted notes with harmonics have become mainstays of the electric bass, and it was Jaco that brought them to our attention.
2. Propulsive 16th note lines
Although Rocco Prestia is widely considered to be the king of relentless 16th note funk grooves – Tower of Power released ‘What Is Hip?’ around the same time as this record came out – Jaco was no slouch either and many of his signature lines, including the chorus to ‘Come On, Come Over’, consist of rapid fire funk motifs interspersed with ghost notes. The 2-bar groove that serves as the main line for this tune is no exception:
Here Jaco begins by outlining the Em7 harmony before descending into open position and using a combination of chord tones and ghost notes to create the rest of the line – he alternates figures on beat 4, first landing on the 5th and then resolving to the open E; this helps to give the groove a more ‘composed’ feeling compared to a constant 1-bar vamp.
Sharp-eyed (and sharp-eared) readers might have spotted that the main groove is almost identical to that of ‘Kuru/Speak Like a Child’ from his debut album, albeit at a slower tempo. The melodic contour of the line is also very similar to that of one of Jaco’s most famous grooves, the chorus of ‘Come on, Come Over’, with the highest note placed on beat 2 of the bar and the introduction of ghost notes in the second half of each bar:
Another of Jaco’s frequently used trademarks is the chromatic approach, either as a single chromatic approach from a semitone below a chord tone, or a double chromatic approach from a tone below.
These first appear in bars 9 and 10 of the transcription – the sections labelled as ‘chorus’ and ‘bridge’ on the transcription are also littered with these approaches.
Bar 21 of the transcription shows the use of a double chromatic approach at the end of the second verse, where Jaco targets the major 3rd of the D7 chord and uses the open D string to create a double stop:
He would use throughout his later compositions most notably ‘Continuum’.
The chorus figure that uses root- 5th with single chromatic approaches actually hints at the infamous ‘Jaco Samba’ pattern that forms that basis of his lines on ‘(Used To Be A) Cha Cha’ and ‘Invitation’.
4. Rhythmic Displacement
As the song progresses, the verse/chorus/bridge structure gives way to a lengthy, less structured outro section. Here, Jaco leaves his opening groove behind and gives us another great 2 bar vamp that combines propulsive 16th note playing with chromaticism and some simple, yet effective rhythmic displacement:
Displacing the opening of bar 1 ahead by a 16th note transforms this from a stock Em funk groove into something special.
After 12 bars of this, Jaco cranks out a variation on this line that gives a nod towards what would become a cornerstone of his style…
5. Pentatonic Sequencing
Bar 97 of the transcription shows Jaco playing this line:
The first 2 beats are comprised of a minor pentatonic scale sequenced in 4ths and 5ths – after beginning with the root note he plays 4th to flat 7, 5th to root, then 5th to flat 7; This sort of thing was unusual at the time, with most scale sequencing being of the linear variety (typically using consecutive notes in the scale played in 3 or 4 note groupings).
Jaco was one of the first to employ wider interval skips, which became features of his landmark solos including Continuum, Port of Entry and Havona.
Get out more, get more out of it Confessions of a working bassist #37: I’m terrible at getting out to hear gigs. Maybe 3 times a year I’ll get my…
Get out more, get more out of it
Confessions of a working bassist #37: I’m terrible at getting out to hear gigs. Maybe 3 times a year I’ll get my act together, check listings, book tickets and go and enjoy being in the audience rather than on the stage.
This post comes from one such occasion this time last year, when I saw that Mark Giuliana was coming to town – I’d heard lots of buzz about him from other musicians and was vaguely aware of his Beat Music project (featuring bass hero Tim LeFebvre) but had never actually bothered to listen to much of his output.
One of the most memorable moments of the gig involved a tune with a lengthy bass and drum intro that consisted of nothing but horribly syncopated unison stabs and didn’t appear to feature any repeating figures. After some Spotify surfing the following morning, it turned out that the song in question was ‘One Month’ from 2015’s Family First album – I realised yesterday that it had been on my transcription ‘to-do’ list for almost an entire year, and my brain was repeatedly nagging me to sit down and decipher what was going on:
It’s 2 notes in 4/4 time – how hard could it be?! Try sight reading this at 130bpm:
It’s a roast-up, right? Now, if you want a real challenge, attempt to memorise it.
Dealing with flyshit
I still vividly remember my first lecture at music college – I was 19 years old and had come from a small town with very little in the way of a music scene, so I thought I was pretty good. As soon as this was put in front of me I quickly realised that I knew nothing:
Having grown up on a solid diet of internet TABs and Hot Licks videos, my reading ability was somewhat lacking. I was determined not to be beaten by the little black dots, and by the end of the year I was one of the best readers in the class. How did I do it?
From zero to (reading) hero
My lectures didn’t start until 11am, so I resolved to get up at 7.30 every day and do a couple of hour’s work on my weaknesses – there were (and still are) many – with a particular focus on reading. I worked on rhythm separately from pitch and slogged my way through this riveting tome:
If you can read this book, you can read (almost) anything. And, if you can read it then you can also hear rhythmic figures elsewhere and write them down quickly There’s an entire blog post on it here.
