Sommaire pour June 2022 de Bass Player

When I first heard the music of Khruangbin, recommended to me by the editor of BP’s sister magazine Guitarist, I wasn’t sure what I was hearing—but I knew it sounded good. At the heart of Khruangbin’s strangely compelling blend of musical genres was a bass player of astounding economy and taste: a perfect candidate for your attention as the cover star of this magazine, then. Laura Lee isn’t only a musical force to be reckoned with, either: She’s an artistic visionary whose revealing interview tells us much about the dynamics of being in a successful, but resolutely non-mainstream, band. As usual, we don’t discriminate between musical genres in Bass Player. We enter classic Hollywood metal territory in a deep chat with Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe, we enter the jazz…

Groove is largely defined by our understanding of rhythm and time, while the concept of feel is defined by our understanding of stylistic variation. A great exercise to work on is called rhythmic displacement. What I’m going to do is take an eighth-note pattern and play it in two ways: First very short, or staccato, and then secondly playing the notes to their full duration, which is known as tenuto. I’m then going to displace that pattern by one 16th note. The pattern is now going to be falling on the (e) and the (ah) of every quarter note, which is the second and fourth 16th notes of each beat. What I find really interesting is how the short articulation results in straight 16th notes, while the long articulation represents…

How did you get started on bass? PAUL It was half necessity, half fascination. For me, playing bass came as a self-taught extension of my guitar playing, but I always really enjoyed it. Last year, Dead Writers were about to record our debut EP, and we didn’t have a bassist. I had written the bass-lines for the songs anyway, so I stepped up to the job. I knuckled down and got a lot more confident with it, and eventually tracked it in the studio. The bass is so much fun. I love the simplicity and the feel of it. It connects with my primal side. GRANT I started playing cello very young. I quite liked it, but had a very impatient teacher in the public school system. I gave it…

PHIL JONES BASS www.pjbworld.com $359.99 Amp designer and mad scientist Phil Jones has built a reputation for getting a big sound out of small speakers, but there’s usually more than one of them in his products. His latest creation is the multi-instrumental X4 Nanobass, which his company calls the most compact and portable combo he’s ever designed. The unit features a single four-inch driver in an enclosure that measures 6.3” by 7.9” by 7.8” and weighs just 5.3 pounds. Billed as the perfect amp for your desktop or on the go, it has a headphone jack for silent practice and, crucially, two options for playback from external sources. A 1/8” jack lets you manually plug in, while Bluetooth capabilities let you stream from the mobile device of your choice. An independent…

he pentatonic scale has to be the most ubiquitous melodic device in all of music. It is prevalent in blues, jazz, funk, rock, and pretty much all Western music. It’s also widely used in music indigenous to east Asia, south Asia and many African countries. I say all this to state that it’s difficult to find anything new under the sun regarding pentatonic scales—so today, I want to talk about a great scale shape that can easily be used alongside the major and minor pentatonic scales. I call this shape the ‘Ramp’, and it won’t be long before it sparks a wellspring of new ideas to add to your vocabulary. So let’s dive in! This pentatonic shape starts on the second degree of the minor scale and is loosely based…

Word Gets Around (1997) “We made the songs as tight as possible.” “We’d been back and forth to London in [late drummer] Stuart Cable’s yellow ex-BT van for four weeks of meetings, and then signed with V2. Basically they didn’t have a record company, just an office within Richard Branson’s house near Holland Park. They said, ‘Go off, do some shows, and by the time you come back from that small tour, we’ll have a record company for you to work with’. And that started everything for Stereophonics. We had all the songs, already developed through gigging for the previous few years, so it was just a matter of capturing the performance. Marshall Bird and Steve Bush, the producers, wanted to get the energy we’d had when they saw us…

Let’s face it, you’d never expect a mostly instrumental trio who play wilfully uncommercial music to enjoy millions of Spotify plays, over 20 million views of a live stream, slots at major festivals, and regular shows at large venues. The Texan three-piece Khruangbin have done just that, though, earning props from artists such as Flea—a huge fan of their bass player. What’s more, Khruangbin are a real band. These days, we live in a world where solo artists reign supreme. If you play bass, you’ll likely be a side player, hired gun, or weekend warrior. The notion of playing music and going on adventures with your best friends will quickly dissipate, replaced by the realization that what we bring to the table is limited and dictated by whoever hired us.…

“Geezer Butler is really a monster player and a great songwriter. I’m definitely a better player because of him” I started my musical journey on guitar: I’ve been in more bands as a guitar player than a bass player, actually, but I went on one tour where I made a bunch more money than I ever had, and I got all excited and came home and started working on my ‘studio’. It was really just a converted garage that I would record song ideas on with a simple setup, but with this cash burning a hole in my pocket, I did a few upgrades—and one was buying a bass. It was a Fender Jazz, and I still have it. I just wanted to have a bass around in case I…

The Stave: Most music written for the bass guitar uses the bass clef. The example to the right shows the placement of the notes on the stave. Tablature: This is a graphical representation of the music. Each horizontal line corresponds with a string on the bass guitar, with the lowest line representing the lowest pitched string (E). The numbers represent the frets to be played. Numbers stacked vertically indicate notes that are played together. Where basses with five or six strings are required, the tablature stave will have five or six lines as necessary. PLAYING TECHNIQUES SLAP AND POP TECHNIQUE Notes slapped with the thumb are marked with a ‘t’, notes popped with the fingers marked with a ‘p’. ADVANCED SLAP TECHNIQUE Fretting hand slaps are marked ‘lh’ and double…

earning to improvise might seem daunting, but remember one simple rule: the name of the game is always resolution. Improvisation is based on nothing more than tension and release, and today we’re going to demonstrate this using a rudimentary major scale. Say you play two notes separated by a semitone: they’ll fight one another and produce tension. You can then achieve resolution by simply moving in the direction of the prevailing pitch; this usually ends up being the chord tone. In the major scale, there are two instances of this. The first is between the 3rd and 4th degrees, and the second is between the 7th and octave. The 7th is naturally a leading note, so when you play it, it will gravitate towards the octave. On the other hand,…

Welcome to BP’s last page! You’ll now notice a slight change as we move forward with this column: From now on I’ll be focusing on a single item of bass-related gear, whether that’s an amp, an effect or a bass instrument, rather than discussing a broader area of bass activity. Don’t worry, though, the insights will be just as deep—and the sarcastic questions from our editor just as impolite! To kick off, let’s take a look at the famed Steinberger L2, one of the most recognisable bass guitars ever conceived. What a great idea—start the new page with the least cool bass design ever. Shut your piehole! Once you’ve got over your prejudice against anything that looks like it came from the Eighties, there’s much to love about the humble…

The Beatles’ Get Backdocumentary has given Fender’s Bass VI some high-profile exposure There’s plenty of desirable bass gear incoming in due course, kicking off with Ernie Ball Music Man, who have added limited-edition Spring 2022 models to their Ball Family Reserve collection with updated aesthetics and improved electronics. Watch out for an elegant short-scale StingRay bass, loaded with tortoiseshell block inlays and body binding. Featuring a 30” scale length and a single, higher-output neodymium magnet pickup, the downsized four-string is now available in black, having previously only been available in Dropped Copper, Daphne Blue and Olympic White. From the same company, Sterling by Music Man have dressed their four- and five-string Ray34 and Ray35 models in some pretty stunning finishes, including a new-for-2022 Amber. Meanwhile, the pickup specialists Lollar have…

Straight outta Cwmaman in the mid-late Nineties came Stereophonics, a rock band that hammered out tales of small-town life while exploding with riffs and energy. Bassist Richard Jones—no relation to vocalist Kelly Jones—could barely play the bass when he joined the band, although he quickly found his chops courtesy of his first instrument, a Hohner fretless. That bass inspired Jones to play fingerstyle, homing in on intonation and comfort as well as timbre, although he often uses a surprisingly hefty plectrum. The band’s 1997 debut album, Word Gets Around, was released on the back of a host of demo recordings for different labels, the group having honed their sound over several years of live performances in and around the South Wales area. Their latest album, Oochya!, stemmed from a planned…

Flea: Your bass-lines are so beautiful and hypnotic. How do you know when a line is ready? Laura: I tend to write lines designed to loop—so when the end of the line wants to go back to the beginning, it signals completion. Flea: How do the movements of your body relate to your bass playing? Laura: It’s everything. There’s a reason certain music makes you want to bang your head up and down, or push your head front and back like a duck, or jump… I like keeping time with my hips or my knees, which influences how I deliver it on stage. In my head, if what I’m playing makes me dip my hips low, then the groove is strong and it helps me deliver the song how I…

Bassist and composer Michael Feinberg recently released his eighth album as a bandleader, Hard Times—aptly titled given current events. He’s joined by Leo Genovese on keyboards and synths, Billy Buss on trumpet, Godwin Louis on alto, Noah Preminger on tenor, Gabriel Globus-Hoenig on percussion, and Orrin Evans on piano—and there’s also a very special guest, Randy Brecker, who would likely not have been available for the session in non-pandemic circumstances, explains Feinberg. Moreover, this is no ordinary jazz album, he adds: It’s a record with a mission. Where are you from, Michael? I’m from Atlanta. I went to University of Miami for school, and as soon as I graduated, I got the van and drove up to New York. Miami must have been a fun place to go to college.…

FENDER www.fender.com $1199 Fender’s design division have obviously been having a lot of fun lately, expanding their Parallel Universe line of instruments in 2018 with the new Meteora range and adding a Custom Shop version two years later. While that high-spec bass came with an equally high price tag, this new active Meteora has been slotted into Fender’s Player Plus line of relatively affordable, high-functionality instruments, with a user cost in the low four figures. I reviewed the Player Plus Precision a couple of issues back and was impressed, because it offered loads of tone options and playability at a reasonable price, while still being recognisably Fender-esque: Let’s see if the much more radically-shaped Meteora can match up. Build Quality Before we get into the literal nuts and bolts of this…

FLATTLEY flattleyguitarpedals.com/retailers $349 each The UK-built Flattley effects range has been around for a few years now, and we’ve followed their progress with interest. These two bass overdrives, recently updated for a more convenient layout, look and feel fantastic—who doesn’t like ‘Dios Del Muerte’ artwork and a halo light effect? Plugged in, the Bass Chief matches expectations. While we’re inundated here at BPwith nuclear-strength overdrives that will break your neighbor’s fish tank, this one has plenty of subtlety built in. Sure, the Volume control is very responsive and will have your arm off if you roll it on too fast. Still, the other rotary pots—Blend, Overdrive, Bass and Treble—allow you to introduce just a slight touch of crunch to your tone, even at low volume: Enough to add a bit of…

Hey there, bass players! Welcome back to our discussion of patterns. So far, we’ve explored the basics of the blues box, as well as the blues rock walk—two distinctive patterns that fall nicely on the instrument and provide essential ingredients to plenty of our favorite bass-lines. We’re keeping with the theme and this time, adding a little rhythm to our blues. Whether you’re learning Stax, Motown, Muscle Shoals, or even Wrecking Crew repertoire, there’s a common thread that runs throughout the genre of classic soul and R&B. It involves using the root note of the chord, the fifth of the chord, and the major sixth. It lands nicely on the instrument and sounds fantastic over any major chord. Behold, the soul-finger sixth. Plenty of soul bass-lines use syncopation to move…