Bass Player is the world's most comprehensive, trusted and insightful bass publication for passionate bassists and active musicians of all ages. Each issue delivers the latest tips and techniques that are guaranteed to make you a better 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…
Bass collaborations aren’t just commonplace in our world, they’re one of the key elements of our community—allowing us to fuse styles and approaches for the benefit of everyone. Such projects don’t get bigger or better than Bass Extremes, a trio formed in 1992 by Victor Wooten, Steve Bailey, and the esteemed drummer Gregg Bissonette of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band. The trio of Wooten, Bailey, and Bissonette recently completed a string of live dates, as well as announcing a new album. The new release, Slow Down, celebrates 30 years of Bass Extremes and features a host of guests. These range from Bootsy Collins, Marcus Miller and Ron Carter via John Patitucci, Oteil Burbridge and Edgar Meyer to Billy Sheehan, Joe Dart, and Justin Chancellor. Wooten’s long-time collaborator Béla Fleck plays bass…
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…
PIXIES , DOOLITTLE (4AD, 1989) It was often said of the Velvet Underground that few people saw them at the time, but everyone who did subsequently formed a band. Similarly, the number of famous musicians claiming to have been in the audience at the Sex Pistols’ 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall is up to several thousand by now—rather than the 40 or so that did turn up. For a while back in the Eighties, Pixies were firmly in the category of influential, underground cult band, too. Doolittleinvented grunge, and Kim Deal’s bass proved crucial to the sound of that musical revolution Signed to the achingly cool 4AD label, their debut EP Come On Pilgrim launched them as a noisy, bilingual alt-rock band that did away with pretension and embraced melody.…
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…
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…
