Archive for May 2014 - Page 8

Q: What should one be thinking when soloing? Do you simply hum the melody in your head or do you think of the solfege/scale degree at the same time? I try to sing the solfeggi, but when it comes to some scalar sequences or faster phrases, I feel like my head might explode. But if I stop singing the solfeggi,...

Metal bassists don’t often get the credit they deserve. Here’s a video of Hugo Doyon-Karout playing through his bass line on “Guided by Fear” by Brought by Pain. The Montreal-based progressive death metal band delivers crushing riffs, which the bassist runs through with ease. Warning: Death metal vocals ahead.

What’s better than seeing legendary bassist Leland Sklar perform with a super talented songwriter? How about seeing them for free? Sklar will be joining singer/songwriter Judith Owen on her upcoming “Ebb & Flow” tour across the United States. Each show on the duo’s tour will be free, with a suggestion that if you’d like to support the tour, you do...

Meet Chris Kollias, a versatile, busy and humble bassist from Greece who has a great story to share. Chris is No Treble’s reader in the spotlight for the week of May 5, 2014. Bio: I was born on December 8, 1986, and I live in Athens, Greece. I took the first steps in music at the age of 9 by...

Keeley Electronics is now shipping the Neutrino, an envelope filter that’s built for both bass and guitar. The hand-built pedal is a modern compact circuit of an opto-coupler based design that borrows concepts from their other stompboxes. “Our design team focused on building a tunable dual opto-coupler design that could be aligned for unit-to-unit perfection,” company founder Robert Keeley explains....

Simon Fitzpatrick has shared yet another stunning and beautiful solo bass performance. This time around, Simon performs the Erik Satie piece “Gymnopédie No.1”. If you dig Simon’s work as much as we do, you should check out his debut solo album.

Toto is still going strong and the band celebrated a long career with a 35th anniversary tour in 2013. A still-vital group is revealed in the . Known for early 80’s hits like “Rosanna” and “Hold the Line,” the Toto of today includes superstar session bassist Nathan East in the role previously filled (1982-2007) by Mike Porcaro, who suffers from...

Rhythm is both mental and physical. Mental The mental aspect of rhythm is the intellectual understanding of how musical time is organized. For any given piece, passage, or note, this includes things such as: Understanding how many beats are in the measure. How each beat is subdivided. Is it by two, three, five, seven? Perhaps they alternate subdivisions? How long...

We love a good bass duo. Here’s Joe Gallant and Mike Visceglia playing their piece “Outvention.” Taken from the December Fretathon concert in New York City, the piece is a play on Bach’s Inventions, filled with cool counterpoint.

No one out there is quite like Whitechapel, and Gabe Crisp, bassist for the metal group out of Tennessee says he thinks the group’s latest album, , “will set us apart even more.” Crisp spoke on one of four studio videos released by label Metal Blade Records to capture the development of the album, which promises both a brutal and...

Any time you can mention Rocco Prestia, Victor Bailey, Marcus Miller, Flea and Victor Wooten in one sentence, you know things have to be pretty stellar. And that only describes half of this week’s top 10! Here are the most read stories and most watched videos for the week of April 27 – May 3, 2014. Thanks for reading, watching,...

Dunlop is now shipping their Super Bright Bass Strings, which the company designed with slap bass players in mind. The strings are defined by a lighter tension and provide clear highs balanced with a fat fundamental. The sets come in either stainless steel or nickel with options for 4- and 5-string basses with light and medium gauges. They’re available now...