Buzz

At the end of June we posted a player-watch notice for Iris Ornig and her CD New Ground. Now we want to give you an in-depth review of why we originally recommended her. Ornig is “a gifted instrumentalist, a talented composer, and a charismatic performer.” New Ground was released March 3rd, 2009 and features original compositions as well as original...

Epifani has released new additions to their performance series amplifiers, the PS1000 and PS400. It will be available for shipping on July 29th 2009. Epifani started as a creator of custom bass cabinets. It was not long before they moved into amplifier production and were pioneers in digital amps, working on them as early as 1999 with the first production...

Bassist Mike Gordon of Phish has announced that he will be starting a 20-plus date Fall Tour beginning just after Labor Day in Brooklyn, NY that will continue through the beginning of October in Burlington, VT with his solo band. From Gordon’s homepage: “After two highly acclaimed runs last year touring on the release of his album The Green Sparrow,...

Bassist Kyle Eastwood, in a recent interview with All About Jazz, talks about his life as a musician and his latest album Metropolitain. Eastwood has a varied career working as both jazz player and in film score production. “It’s like I have two musical beasts in me,” he admits. “One is the musician, the other the composer. One plays live...

Bob Moog has designed yet another unique effect pedal shown at this years NAMM, the MF-105 MIDI MuRF. The MF-105 is the latest addition to the Moogerfooger family. If you’re not familiar with them, MuRF is short for Multiple Resonance Filter Array and “provides sequenced filter effects that have not been heard before!” The MF-105M is the synthesis of the...

Bassist Victor Wooten published two videos entitled “SMV gets robbed by Spanish Border police” on Youtube. The video comes in two parts: Part 1: Part 2: The event was recorded and posted by Wooten from his iPhone. A response to this posted video was published by In Bass We Trust saying that Wooten has misrepresented Spain. There is a Talk...

Jason Matthews: Wizards in Winter

In 2006, Trans-Siberian Orchestra launched a Youtube contest for the best/most original covers of their song “Wizards In Winter”. One one winner from each of the following categories was chosen: drums, keyboards, guitar and bass. The winner in the bass category was Jason Matthews, who took an interesting approach: basically playing both the bass part and the keyboard part simultaneously....

Bassist Ruth Davies has been featured in a piece by the San Jose Mercury News. Davies is a freelance bassist for jazz and blues and has an impressive discography including Grammy-winning and Platinum records. From her website biography: Ruth has performed with such jazz and blues greats as Charles Brown, Clark Terry, John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, Jay McShann, Van...

How can I make my bass lines more interesting without feeling like I’m playing too much? I feel like when I try and do a little something to add flavor, I’m just forcing licks into the music and over-playing. A: Yeah man, there’s definitely a fine line to be drawn. There are a million ways to add flavor to the...

Decider DC has published an interview with bassist Amanda Tannen from Stellastarr*. Stellastarr has moved from RCA to their own Bloated Wife label after RCA’s merge with Sony. For those of you who are not familiar with them, Stellastarr* is an alternative indie rock band based out of New York City. They’ve been around since 2000 and just released a...

JamBase has a featured article on our favorite “clown prince of prog rock,” the musically eclectic Les Claypool. Claypool recalls his early beginnings on bass, “We [Les and his father] went down to Al’s Music, he knew Al, and we bought this Fender P-Bass copy. I pulled weeds all summer to pay for the damn thing. And because there weren’t...

This lesson is derived from Jon Burr’s The Untold Secret to Melodic Bass. Be sure to check out the complete method book in downloadable PDF, Kindle Book and the all-new paperback formats. I’d bet that you, the reader, have written something, and then later on felt like you found something else that really should have been in there. Well, this...