Buzz

We covered bassist Steve Uccello‘s SYMMETRIA release back in August. Since then, Steve has posted a live looping instructional video of the eighth track on the album, “Chiral”. This video is also part of a lesson on our partner site, Learn the Low End, where Steve is a professor.

Blink-182 bassist Mark Hoppus will be meeting fans at The Fast Life in Los Angeles, California, on Halloween to give away his one-of-a-kind Fender Mark Hoppus model jazz bass with custom artwork by Chase Tafoya. He says it’s been his favorite bass on Blink-182’s latest tour. The giveaway will be in the form of a bingo showdown for 100 lucky...

Them Crooked Vultures, the supergroup made of Led Zeppelin’s bassist John Paul Jones, Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, have announced that November 17th will be the date for the release of their self-titled and self-produced album. The record is going to feature the studio versions of songs Them Crooked Vultures has performed live...

Q: Are there any real shortcuts to learning how to play? A: NO!!!!!!!!!!! Okay, I’ll go on… I have been frustrated by many a student who is disappointed when, at the end of a lesson, their not magically better but, rather, have a years worth of studying and homework to tackle. Not just kids, but adults, too. People seem to...

Colin Hodgkinson: 32-20 Blues

I bet Robert Johnson never imagined someone playing his “32-20 Blues” on bass. But it sure is cool that Colin Hodgkinson did.

Did you know that there are specific types of strings for the upright bass? You get different strings for the different styles of music you can play – even different tunings if you’re playing a classical solo bass piece. Now there is a company dedicated to producing bass strings specifically with rockabilly players in mind: Superior Bassworks. Superior Bassworks creates...

Reader Spotlight: Russ Sargeant

Meet Russ Sargeant, our player in the spotlight for October 27th, 2009. Bio: I’m a bass player living near Birmingham, England – playing a fusion of Jazz and Ambient music. I write and record in my home studio and I have recently taken an outing into the wonderful world of live-looping! Location: Dudley, West Midlands, United Kingdom Day gig: I...

Krantz Carlock Lefebvre is the first studio document of a trio that has been performing together since 1997, although Wayne Krantz regularly releases live recordings from his website. It’s also Krantz’s first studio album under his own name for fifteen years. Krantz is a phenomenal guitarist, and this is a record that guitarists will reference for years to come. Krantz...

In 1994, Stanley Clarke, Al DiMeola and Jean Luc Ponty performed in Montreux. A DVD of the live performance emerged more than 10 years later. This segment features Clarke’s extended solo break, including quotes from his Spanish Phases for Strings and Bass and self-titled albums.

There’s a new product coming out that may re-shape the way we think of music. Melodyne Editor, a Direct Note Access (DNA) program offered by Celemony, is the first of it’s kind. You can analyze a piece of music and change any note in polyphonic material. Watching this software in action borders on spooky. Bassist Jeff Schmidt has posted a...

Let’s face it bassists, in all probability our collective bands fall overwhelmingly into the independent-music category. Whether it’s our rock band, solo bass work, free jazz or metalcore, we’re independent artists. When Billboard published their “Billboard’s 2009 Maximum Exposure List” it included many unrealistic goals for independent musicians – for example, playing on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Ariel Hyatt, an...

We know that there are many flavors of dominant chord. Various upper extensions of the chord—or alterations of the fifth—suggest different harmonic environments, each with its own chordal scale and triad polychords expressing the arrays of extensions. We’ll explore the most commonly used of these chords and extensions in a future column—but first… What do these extensions mean for the...