Archive for May 2014 - Page 4

Mark Egan (Pat Metheny Group, Sting, Arcadia, Roger Daltry and Joan Osborne) is showing off his stellar fretless bass chops on About Now, his seventh album. Egan, a contemporary jazz composer, recorded the instrumental album as part of a trio featuring Danny Gottlieb on drums and Mitchel Forman on keyboards, both musicians with whom he has recorded before — Gottlieb...

Meet Jay Dwyer, a bassist from the Chicago area who has a very cool gig: paying tribute to John Entwistle and playing his amazing bass lines in a Who tribute band. Jay is No Treble’s reader in the spotlight for the week of May 19, 2014. Bio: I am 55 and I started playing at age 7. I’ve actively gigged...

Analog Alien is now shipping the Alien Bass Station, a pedal that puts three effects into one box. The effects, which include a limiter, an amp generator, and a gamma fuzz, can be used independently or simultaneously for tonal flexibility. Each section has separate output knobs to adjust that effects signal strength. The limiter has a limit-comp knob for the...

We hear from a lot of readers who say they discovered Vulfpeck thanks to No Treble sharing their awesome videos. And we’ve said it before – all of Vulfpeck’s members are stellar musicians. But it is bassist Joe Dart who really knocks us out every time we hear one of their tunes. The guys in Vulfpeck surely know what a...

Linley Marthe, the bass virtuoso from Mauritius, has teamed up with vocalist Monika Njava in the new world music/jazz hybrid group, Island Jazz, which has released its . Njava sings in English and several dialects of Malagasy, the language of her home country, Madagascar, which lies west of the island of Maruitius — the birthplace of the now Paris-based Marthe,...

When playing at slow speeds we can concentrate on our physical movements for every single note we play. However, this becomes impractical at high rates of speed. When playing at high speed it helps to group notes, and motions, together into a single action. The number of notes we can combine will depend on the requirements of the specific passage,...

Every time I watch a video by Dominic “Forest” Lapointe, it’s sure to blow me away. This one is no exception. Here’s the fretless 6-stringer playing through “Nothing is Everything” by Death. The track comes from their 1993 album Individual Though Patterns, which was originally played by fellow fretless metal player Steve DiGiorgio.

R.E.M. was the only band to ever headline MTV’s acoustic “Unplugged” series twice, and now both those performances — from 1991 and 2001 – are available in a . The 1991 performances features the entire original band — vocalist Michael Stipe, guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry, while the 2001 performance occurred after Berry left the...

There’s enough bass for this to go to 11, but it is called “Top 10” for a reason. Here are the most read bass-focused stories and how-to’s and the most watched bass videos for the week of May 11-17, 2014. Thanks as always for reading, commenting and sharing. 1. Ben Rouse: Bach Cello Suite No.1 – Prelude on Kala U-Bass...

In 2006, Jeff Beck’s group took the stage at the North Sea Jazz Festival, with Randy Hope Taylor on bass, Jason Rebello on keys and Vincent Colaiuta on drums. During the performance, Stanley Clarke joined the band to perform Clarke’s tune “Lopsy Lu” (with Taylor continuing to hold it down, and a little Hendrix thrown in). Enjoy!

Down has followed up the 2012 EP Down IV, Part One, fittingly enough with the 6-song set, . The group, which includes pedigrees from Pantera and Corrosion of Conformity, features a new guitarist, Bobby Landgraf. And the new EP, recorded at bandleader Philip Anselmo’s New Orleans home studio, also known as “Nodferatu’s Lair,” is full of the heavy riff the...

TC Electronic has released a new line of Mini Pedals, which takes their existing TonePrint stompboxes and retools them to fit into smaller enclosures. The lineup includes the Flashback Mini Delay, Shaker Mini Vibrato, Corona Mini Chorus and Vortex Mini Flanger. Each of the pedals has been reduced to a three-knob interface for adjusting on the fly, but they’re also...