Table of contents for Show 2020 in Bass Player

Hello bass players! This time around I’m going to be talking all things stage presence. I won’t be steering you towards stagediving and climbing amp stacks—instead, we’ll be focusing on the nuances of performance and how to project confidence with a few simple considerations. First, the way in which you hold yourself plays a big part in exuding confidence. A bassist whose gaze is firmly directed at their fretboard for the whole show will cast a closed and unimposing figure. Roll your shoulders back and open up your posture: this immediately creates a more striking silhouette and should ease any tension in your playing. I would also suggest implementing a more dominant stance, with your feet being shoulder width apart. Even at a static level, this creates a much more…

“The very first issue of Bass Player felt like a coming of age. It was as if all the collective sweat, dedication and perseverance of countless bassists was finally being recognized as the creative force it is. It hasn’t been an easy road with all the changes in the music and publishing worlds over these years, but regardless of who’s featured, each issue feels like a victory for all of us. Congratulations and many, many thanks to everyone at Bass Player for figuring out where we’re going, writing it down and putting it out into the world so the rest of us have the perspective to continue to groove, rock, swing, sing, innovate, create and move our instrument forward.”…

SILVIA BLUEJAY “Being able to buy good quality basses for an affordable amount of money. Having your favorite luthier build you a custom-built bass guitar on the basis of your specifications is all well and good, but many of us don’t have the money, crystal-clear ideas for our specs—or, to be honest, the need.” PHILIP MANN “No preamp, guitar, or piece of software from the last 30 years can equal the impact that the internet has had on musicians and music education alike. On a weekly basis, I am now able to greet my students on a worldwide platform—something I could have never have dreamed of as a bassist in the 90s.” ELLEN O’REILLY “The creation of my custom Sandberg California VT, with a drop-D Hipshot and a very comfortable…

The Woodshed persistent demand for traditional, Fender-style bass guitars has made passive tone controls part of the musical soundscape for generations of bass players, despite trends for active EQ circuits. Passive circuits have endured, not simply because some manufacturers are too cheap to invest in a preamp, but because passive circuits possess their own character as well as offering some advantages, including simplicity that can benefit even the most technologically adept player. A passive tone control is a simple device that functions as a low pass filter. Consisting of a single potentiometer and a capacitor, a source signal from a pickup or pickups enters the potentiometer and high frequencies are filtered to ground through the capacitor. Take a break from technology and go straight to the board Compared to active EQ…

After 400 issues of chronicling the ups and downs of the bass industry, we feel it’s time to hand something back to you, the loyal reader who has supported us along the way—so what have we got to offer? First, thanks to our chums at Fender, we have a 60th Anniversary Jazz bass for you. This amazing instrument comes with two Pure Vintage ’62 pickups, a pair of concentric volume and tone controls, an alder body and maple neck with a bound rosewood fingerboard, bone nut, vintage-correct 7.25” radius, vintage tall frets, and a fast and comfortable 60s ‘U’ profile. Its lacquer finish in Arctic Pearl is complemented by the tortoiseshell pickguard, white binding on the neck and matching headcap, and it comes with a deluxe vintage- style case with…

Even for those of us that lived through it, it can be difficult to remember what being a musician was like when Bass Player magazine first appeared on the scene. 1990 feels not so much like a different era as a different planet—and, up until that point, interstellar sonic exploration among bassists was a relatively rare event. Certain pedals were already firmly within the bassist’s consciousness by that point, of course. Pino Palladino and Guy Pratt had made the sound of the octaver recognizable the world over, and Bootsy Collins’ fuzzed-out, envelope-filtered, and delay-drenched sound was an integral part of the history and development of funk, but the 90s saw a rapid expansion in the world of bass-specific pedals and effects. Whether the birth of BP had an influence on…

Hi there, fellow bass players—I’m thrilled to be writing to you for the first time! As a long-time reader of BP and someone who has obsessed over the bass guitar for years, I’m honored to share my insights with you. I like to think of bass players as thoughtful individuals—people who respect the heart that goes into music, who discover the beauty in nuance, and who find glory in the groove—and I hope to write with the attention to detail that you deserve. With that in mind, I hope to inspire you with some musical tools of refinement. Our greatest tool? The ability to listen. To hone in on the low notes, the complex rhythms, and the stunning riffs that inspire us to pick up our instrument. This ability to…

Pentatonic scales have been part of the backbone of contemporary music for well over half a century—but even so, they’re often overlooked or taken for granted. This is because they’re seen by some musicians as an overly simple, even inferior, form of vocabulary. Right then, time for me get on my soapbox and have a rant... If you think that pentatonic scales are ‘just five notes’ and should be dismissed for a mo re sophisticated vocabulary, then prepare to have your horizons expanded! Pentatonic scales are remarkable melodic structures that should be respected and employed as part of every musician’s stock vocabulary. They are easy to play, effective on the ear, and incredibly adaptable to a huge array of performance scenarios. Before we delve into this month’s practical examples, let’s…

john Wardle became Jah Wobble, it is said, courtesy of a drunken mispronunciation of his name by the late Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, and duly became the bassist in that band’s singer John Lydon’s new project, Public Image Limited, after the Pistols’ implosion. An oft-troubled character, Wobble left PiL in 1980 and spent the rest of the decade on various projects including Invaders Of The Heart. His jobs at the time included working for the London Underground, but by the 1990s he had recommitted to music. Wobble was always more than a mere post-punk grappler, and he has collaborated with a host of diverse musicians from Brian Eno to Baaba Maal. One of his most-acclaimed recent projects was the stunning 2008 LP, Chinese Dub, a hybrid of original music from…

Depending on your point of view, 400 issues of Bass Player magazine—which has variously been a bimonthly, monthly and four-weekly publication over the last 30 years—might mean 400 hours of reading over a coffee; it might signify several thousand interviews with bass players; or it might involve hundreds of hours of slaving over lessons and transcriptions, bass in hand. It might mean all of those things, or something else entirely. That’s the beauty of an information source like this one—you take from it what you will. But there’s more to BP than that. For us, the magazine staff and writers, and those who came before us, it means years of dedication—an entire career’s worth of it in some cases. We sink our hearts and souls into this magazine, not because…

1990 Ric Grech (Family, Blind Faith, Traffic) 1991 Roger Patterson (Atheist) 1993 Randy Jo Hobbs (Jimi Hendrix, Edgar Winter) 1994 Kristen Pfaff (Hole) 1996 Chas Chandler (Animals) • Bernard Edwards (Chic) 1997 Ronnie Lane (Small Faces, Faces) 1999 Mark Sandman (Morphine) 2000 Allen Woody (Allman Bros, Gov’t Mule, Montage, Peter Criss) 2001 Leon Wilkeson (Lynyrd Skynyrd) 2002 Ray Brown • James Dewar (Robin Trower) • John Entwistle (The Who) Dee Dee Ramone 2003 Maurice Gibb (Bee Gees) • Noel Redding (Jimi Hendrix Experience) • Greg Ridley (Humble Pie) 2004 Rick James • Arthur Kane (New York Dolls) • Bernard Odum (James Brown, Maceo Parker) 2006 Boz Burrell (King Crimson, Bad Company) 2007 Paul Raven (Ministry, Killing Joke) 2009 Ean Evans (Lynyrd Skynyrd) • Kelly Groucutt (ELO) • Hugh Hopper (Soft…

As a part of the review team on this magazine, I’ve had the good fortune to encounter some fantastic basses over the years. There have been many contenders, so this list of 30 instruments is very much the tip of the iceberg. Very few basses are sub-standard these days, thanks to advancements in construction technology, which makes the selection even more difficult, but here goes! A Pedulla Rapture RBJ2000 five-string was one of my earliest reviews, and the package from top to bottom was highly impressive, with tones to die for courtesy of the Bartolini single-coils. With its glass-like polyester fingerboard coating, a Pedulla Buzz confirmed the immense praise I’d always heard being heaped on these basses—it was everything a great fretless should be. Proving that a great Jazz bass…

I SPY... 62 RYAN MADORA Dig into your favorite bass parts... and discover treasure! Ryan Madora is one of Nashville’s most sought-after touring and session bassists. Recent touring and session credits include Robben Ford, Kyshona Armstrong, and her instrumental trio, The Interludes. For the past five years, she has served as musical director for Bobby Bones and has played with Garth Brooks, Darius Rucker, and Carrie Underwood. In addition to instructing at Nashville’s campus of Musician’s Institute, Ryan has taught at Gerald Veasley’s Bass Boot Camp, Rock’n’Roll Fantasy Camp, and at universities across the USA. She has contributed columns to No Treble for over a decade and in 2019, published her first book, Bass Players To Know: Learning From The Greats. Ryan offers online education at TrueFire and through her…

Welcome to BP 400! This month, we’re going to look at an aspect of controlling your sound that is often overlooked, but which for a number of reasons has become more and more noticeable over the years—giving notes their full length. The amount of decay we want in a particular note—from ultra-short palm-muted notes to infinite sustain—is a huge factor in shaping the sound of a line and its impact on the song. Today, we’re looking at the sustain end of the graph. The reasons why this has become more significant over time are both stylistic and technological. Style-wise, the prevalence of synth bass in much pop music has brought about a taste for incredibly smooth-sounding bass-lines—often with no gap between the end of one note and the start of…

Welcome back to my ongoing series covering some of the more advanced slap bass techniques. Over the past few issues, we’ve added some great techniques to our toolkit: Fretting-hand slaps, double-popping, chord-strumming, and tenths, to name just a few. We’re going to hold off on adding new techniques for a couple of issues now, and instead look at how we can apply what we have over different feels. Many bass players feel very comfortable employing their slap techniques over a straight 4/4 rhythm, but far less comfortable when the music has a swing or shuffle feel. In these alternate feels, linear slap grooves—particularly those that incorporate fretting-hand slaps—can be a little more difficult to execute, and it’s these grooves that we’ll be focusing on in this column, and the next.…

Welcome back! It’s time to turn our attention to the beginning of our signal path and resolve the long-standing debate—wireless or no wireless? Why use a wireless anyway? Cable not good enough for you, Veall? Well, the magic of being unleashed from an amplifier—sending your sound through the airwaves and leaving you free to prance about the stage—is hard to beat. No cables, yours or anyone else’s, to get tangled up with; no standing on your cable and pulling it out of your bass, pedals or amp—and of course, there’s nothing like that age-old cliché of going for a little jaunt out into the audience to take in the atmosphere a bit more. Wireless does come with downsides, though, and I’m here to talk about just a handful of those.…