Table of contents for October 2020 in Bass Player

Welcome! It’s been another busy month in the world of Bass Player magazine. As I write this, in early September, the music industry isn’t yet showing signs of significant recovery from the current pandemic. It’ll be some time before we’re able to get out and play live, it seems. Still, there are upsides to this. One of these is that we’re able to spend time on our bass playing; another is that we’re motivated to write and record the songs that we can’t play live. This leads me to Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, whose band may be hugely successful, but who still has the urge to compose, hence his new solo EP, and this month’s cover feature. We could all learn from his refusal to hit the couch and…

“I feel like we’ve been outcasts for 20 years—only now are people opening up and accepting what we do! We’ve always had a hardcore customer base in engineering, because engineers and computer guys like what we do. The late Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, had one of our basses, and so do people at NASA. Guys like that got what we were doing and they kept us alive. “The late Paul Allen of Microsoft had one of our basses, and so do people at NASA” “Every Chinese-sourced Dingwall bass gets between two and six hours of labor and care at the Canada shop, while the Custom Shop models take 50 to 100 hours of labor. The factory we use in China listens to what we have to say, and…

Hello again, bass players! In the next few issues, I’m going to be expanding on the world of monitoring and how to get the right sound balance on stage. When asking various musician colleagues and friends about what it is that ruins gigs the most for them, poor monitoring or on-stage sound is regularly the culprit. This can make it very difficult to commit to your live performance in the same way as you normally would, and often gives musicians a negative experience—which is the last thing we want. First off, we need to consider how to make this process as easy as possible for everyone. In Tax The Heat, we have a ‘Monitoring Sheet’ along with our Tech Spec that details what each of us wants in our monitors—and…

“My style is melodic and it suits songwriters. I’ve never really been into techniques...” There were many fretless bass players of various styles when I was young; the guys who were an influence on my journey to find my own sound were an assortment of individuals. I found something different in each of them, that shaped the way I went about my own voice. These ranged in approach, from the highly proficient playing of Gary Willis; the smooth and silky approach of Tony Franklin; abstract and innovative lines from Mick Karn; and the king tone and technique of Jaco Pastorius, to name a few. One of my favorite bands back then, along with Rush, Yes, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Queen, and Iron Maiden, was Jethro Tull. Every musician in the band…

The great Christian McBride is equally at home with a stand-up bass—playing jazz with legends like Chick Corea, Diana Krall and McCoy Tyner—and the electric instrument, in connection with soul titans James Brown and Aretha Franklin as well as rock stars such as Paul McCartney and Sting. A prolific solo artist, he has a sizeable discography of his own behind him as well as countless sessions; his latest album, The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait Of Four Icons, is out now. Christian, does your double bass playing inform your electric technique? “I was doing things on the double bass that I wasn’t supposed to. It helps to be a rebel sometimes” Actually it’s the other way around, because I started on the electric bass. When I moved to the double…

Price | $2,599 Made In | Czech Republic Color | Night Sky Holosparkle Body | Mahogany with maple top, gloss finish; Satin Black option costs £1699 Neck | Maple, three-piece laminate, gloss finish, matching headstock Scale and string spacing | 34”, 19mm (adjustable) Neck Joint | Through-neck Nut Width | 40mm Fingerboard | Rosewood Frets | 24 Pickups | Aguilar DCB humbuckers x 2 Electronics | Aguilar OBP-2, 9-volt, 2-band EQ Controls | Volume, pickup pan, stacked bass and treble (cut/boost) Hardware | Black hardware, Gotoh machine heads, Hipshot Kickass 3D bridge Weight | 9 lbs Case/gig bag included | Gig bag (upgrade to a Hiscox case for £109 extra) Left-hand option available | No WHAT WE THINK Plus | Looks, tones and playability Minus | No passive options Overall…

There are many different incarnations of the standard 12-bar blues, but before venturing into new territory it’s worth learning the standard format. The first chord chart shows the most common 12-bar blues in the key of A. Typically in blues music, the chords are dominant 7ths (A7, D7, etc), so the root, 3rd, 5th and b 7th intervals of the chords can form the larger part of any bass-line played over the progression. Your next step is to move on from a chord interval-only bass-line to a walking line, and the concept is fairly simple: each new chord should be approached from a semitone above or below the root note, before landing on the root bang on the change. Adhere to this basic rule and you can tackle the approach…

Back when Prince was just a hot new nightclub act... Before the late Prince Rogers Nelson’s albums, films, controversy, and stardom, he earned his bones as a performer on the Minneapolis club scene. His bassist, Mark Brown—whose stage name was and remains Brown Mark—accompanied him on those stages from 1981, as he recalls in his new memoir, My Life In The Purple Kingdom. “Playing with Prince was like attending an intense school of raw funk-rock,” Mark tells BP. “With freedom to express myself, he enabled me to grow not only as a bassist, but also as a performer. The work ethic I gleaned from him helped me in every aspect of my music career, from songwriting, to stage performance. You can do anything you put your heart and mind into.”…

elcome back! This month is a brief introduction to the 6th mode of melodic minor, notated here as E Locrian 9. Due to their popularity, we’ve covered Lydian Dominant and Altered Scale in recent columns, and the 6th mode of melodic minor is also used extensively in harmonic settings which lend themselves to melodic minor modes. Locrian 9 is most often used over min7 b 5 chords, or half-diminished, if you prefer. The characteristic extension is the 9th, which separates it from the Locrian mode—the 7th mode of the major scale, which contains a b 9th—and the Locrian 13—the 2nd mode of Harmonic Minor, which contains a b9th/ 13th. All of these half-diminished mode variants contain a perfect 11th. The 6th mode of melodic minor is used extensively in harmonic…

What were your inspirations for your new album, Mordechai? It’s funny. I’m trying to think how to say this... The experience happens, and you feel inspired, and then as time goes on, it is almost like the experience changes in hindsight. I went through a lot last year, personally: I don’t think I realized how swept away I’d got with touring, and with just the world and lifestyle that I was living. I love it, I can’t wait to get back in it when the world allows for it again, but, yes, I just hadn’t realized how taken away with it I got. Reality becomes strange, especially because we turn into these alter egos when we are on stage. Were you seeking to re-ground yourself? “Reality can become strange, especially…

“Born To Thrash is our coronavirus album! We recorded it by accident at a show last year. A friend told us he’d recorded the audio of our set and that if we gave him some Jack and Coke we could have it. We forgot about it until this year’s tours got canceled and everything was fucked up, so we scheduled the live album. We wanted it to be a quick digital release, with the vinyl and physical product coming later, and to make some live clips to promote it, we had the footage from a camera crew that was making a film about us. That’s on ice because we can’t travel right now, but we’ll get back to it. The idea is to make it not just about sex, drugs,…

After last month’s look at sustain, let’s take some time to revisit one of the most expressive techniques that we can couple with those long notes—slides! No, not bits of metal or glass pipe on our fingers—those can be great fun too, but probably not within the context of a beginner column. Today we’re going to talk about sliding notes along the neck. Sliding offers us a number of different ways to alter our musical choices in any given situation. It offers a novel way to get between two notes; a way to change position if we have a line that won’t fit into a four-fret span on our bass; a way to approach any note to give it some movement; and a cool effect. Here, we pluck the note…

Welcome back to my series of columns covering advanced slap bass techniques. When it comes to playing slap grooves, many of us fall into the trap of playing only in 4/4 time, with a straight feel. Of course, music comes in all shapes and sizes, and it’s vital that you’re able to apply your slap chops to a variety of different feels and time signatures. In the last issue, we worked on playing slap grooves against the shuffle feel, which can be tricky as many of the common slap bass ‘moves’ don’t work as well, or at least need to be adjusted. We’re going to continue in that theme in this month’s instalment. Before we dive into the exercises, let’s consider the swung sixteenth-note feel. It can be useful to…

"Whatever we grab from the past, we try to pull it into the future" FREEKBASS RETURNS IN STYLE The funk bassist extraordinaire delivers new, amped-up music If one single isn’t enough, why not release a new song a month? That’s the philosophy of Cincinnati-based bassist and bandleader Chris ‘Freekbass’ Sherman, who kicked off his new run of music for 2020 with a single, ‘Runaway’, back in August. As he tells BP, “‘Runaway’ had a distinct blueprint we were going for with feel, groove, and sound. We were going for that early-80s, robotic sound, right before drum machines and keyboard-sequencers hit the world. We’re still playing the funk, with an ultra-tight feel. Our producer Eddie Roberts said to think of the sound of those early Cameo albums, which painted a perfect…

As Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament awoke on New Year’s Day, 2020, he knew that in a few short months, his band would release Gigaton—their hotly-anticipated eleventh album, and the veteran rock quintet’s first clutch of new material since 2013. Sprawling tours of North America and Europe would follow. For Jeff and his bandmates—vocalist Eddie Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, and drummer Matt Cameron—this was shaping up to be their busiest and most important year in quite some time. And yet on this warm July day, we find him relaxing with a cup of tea in the cosy confines of his Montana home, half a world away from the stages of Europe. The Pearl Jam tours, of course, are casualties of the current global pandemic. “Montana’s where I…

Sum up your career as a bass player for us, Ian. My career has generally revolved around reading music under pressure, whether that means West End shows in London, or recording film soundtracks. What was your most recent live project before the current pandemic? The London show Hamilton was the last major thing I was involved in; the last performance we did before lockdown was on March 14. I drove home, thinking, ‘I’ll have a bit of time off for a while’ and until it returns, presumably in 2021, I’ve been doing a lot of online teaching. We musicians are quite entrepreneurial, so the industry may have ground to a halt—but we’ll be back on stage when the situation improves. Hamilton has been a major success. What does the gig…

Any bass bearing a famous name gains more than its fair share of attention, especially when there’s a significant pricetag attached—and if the name is that of a member of Led Zeppelin, that attention is doubled, not least from us. We’ve been keeping track of John Paul Jones’s association with luthier Hugh Manson for many years, so we’re very interested indeed to see how the latest iteration of JPJ’s famous Manson stacks up, with a Standard bass alongside for comparison. Build Quality This pair of basses were crafted in the Czech Republic before making their way to Ashburton in the UK for a final setup and inspection. Both arrive in Hiscox cases, and when you pull them out, they’re immediately appealing. Both feature through-neck construction, a mahogany body core, a…

We’ve all dreamed of having a custom bass one day, and in today’s digitally-managed world, it seems that most bass players with medium-sized budgets can afford one. The first time we heard of an online configurator for a custom bass was by Sandberg—credit where it’s due—and now the same concept is available from Bite Guitars, whose website offers you the chance to design a bass with a ton of different materials and sound options. For around $1,400, you can nab an instrument like this one, a Precision-style bass with individual artwork. Let’s see what we’re getting. Build Quality The body shape and scale length of this eight-pound, 34” P-Bass are instantly familiar for anyone who has spent time with an average Fender, but the Roxanne is smaller and more manageable…

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…

This lesson is designed to take you from the basics of thumb slapping all the way to more advanced techniques such as popping, ghost notes, slides, and hammer-ons. The most crucial part of thumb slapping is rotating your wrist as you slap (keeping your arm otherwise steady), so that the bony part of your thumb hits the strings. The fleshy part deadens them. Dry, muted notes are a key part of slap bass too, providing rhythmic and percussive groove to the standard slapped notes. The muted notes in our examples (denoted by an X) are played with a picking-hand thumb slap, accompanied by a slap on the strings with your fretting fingers. This two-hand approach may well come naturally as you get up to speed. Finally, there’s the ‘pop’, played…