Table of contents for March 2021 in Bass Player

Jazz bassist, educator, and author Danny Ziemann has published Topics In Jazz Bass Vol. 2: Soloing through Low Down Publishing this past month. This is the fourth bass publication from Ziemann, written for bassists looking to solo with freedom and authentic self-expression. As he says, “The idea of soloing ‘not being part of the job’—it being a taboo—is a misnomer. Bass players who don’t spend time exploring their solo voice miss out on a beautiful and necessary part of our tradition. We need to embrace all parts of the music.”…

Catherine ‘Cat’ Popper has played with a mighty list of celebs—Jack White, Brian Fallon, Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, Norah Jones, Puss N Boots, Willie Nelson, Peter Rowan and Tony Rice, Grace Potter, Jesse Malin, Tommy Stinson and Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble Band among them. Tired of the road, she joined the Broadway show Dianain 2020, just in time for the pandemic to take that gig away—leaving her free to write her first solo song, ‘Maybe It’s All Right’. Not that she did it entirely willingly, as she explains. Cat, what led you to record solo music now? I took a little break from the road in 2019, because it’s hard on my body, and I took the Dianagig last February. The great thing about Broadway is that you can…

BORN1964 RESIDENTUK NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS Thirty years in Jools Holland’s TV, radio and touring band, making him Britain’s most-watched bassist.; innumerable live and studio sessions with the most famous names in the world. SELECTED BASS GEAR Ibanez / Bergantino / Wilcock Mullarkey / Yamaha SLB Electric Upright / Roger Dawson double bass / Fishman Full Circle double bass pickup / Fishman Pro Platinum EQ/DI for double bass / DPA 4099 double bass mic / Pirastro, Dunlop and Thomastik-Infeld strings / Mono bass cases, FlyBy back pack and Betty straps / Peterson strobe tuners / Jule Amps Dove Cage Monique preamp/DI / Nordstrand pickups / Nordstrand StarLifter preamp/DI / John East onboard preamps / Ultimate Ears UE11 IEMs / Porter & Davies Kinetic Transfer vibrating platform / Bass Center, Dunlop and Boss…

Price| $1349 Made In| Indonesia Color| Candy apple red, gloss finish Body| Ash Neck| Maple, 35” scale, satin finish Neck Joint| Bolt-on, five-bolt attachment Nut Width| 40mm Fingerboard| Rosewood Frets| 22 Pickups| Lakland Chi-Sonic Jazz single-coil pickups x 2 Electronics| Passive Controls| Volume, volume, tone Hardware| Chrome hardware, Lakland dual-access bridge, Hipshot Ultra-lite satin chrome machine heads Weight| 9.9 lbs Case/gig bag included| No Left-hand option available| No WHAT WE THINK Plus| Classic tones Minus| There are cheaper, yet similar specced, basses Overall| An impressive instrument BGM RATING BUILD QUALITY SOUND QUALITY VALUE…

TONE POCKET Price | $219 Made In | China Output | Line Out, Headphone Out, USB and DAW Features | Three-band EQ, DAW connection (zero latency, 48K / 44.1KHz sampling rate), Soft Mute function, high-performance 16-bit audio DAC, compatible with multiple platforms, 10v power supply or USB power, five-year warranty Weight | 0.6 lbs WHAT WE THINK Plus| Versatile DAW interface Minus| None Overall| Affordable, pocket-sized headphone amp BGM RATING BUILD QUALITY SOUND QUALITY VALUE…

Fusion bassist and producer Adam Nitti performs vocals, guitar, keyboard, and bass on his sixth solo album, The World Is Loud, and explains: “This album was a tip of the hat to all of my earliest influences. Before I was exposed to jazz and fusion, my first bass heroes were players like Geddy Lee, John Paul Jones, and Chris Squire, who were all in very successful rock bands. My hope is that when people hear this music, they will hear a modern rock album that captures some of the elements that made the music from my roots so engaging. I wanted it to be as enjoyable to listen to as it was to create.” www.theworldisloud.com…

BRANDI DISTERHEFT WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF PLAYING WITH VETERAN MUSICIANS? "On my new album, Surfboard, I play with the tenor saxophonist George Coleman, and also the Brazilian drummer Portinho. You know, Porto has a way of uplifting the beat. It’s so funky, with such an infectious groove, and he has so much dynamic range. He has strict rules, but once you learn them, he wants you to break away. He’s always anticipating, turning around the phrases. It’s so much fun. And George loves to keep people on their toes. He’ll change harmony at the drop of a hat.” ADAM RIGG BAD DAY BLUES BAND WHAT’S THE SECRET OF PLAYING BASS WELL? "As I started tracking bass for our new album, Table By The Wall, I pondered what the secret…

Great to see you, bass players! This month, we’ll begin to take a look at optimizing your tone and sound to ensure that every note cuts through when playing live. Now, there are many options here, and some of these will suit certain gear combinations much better than others, so I’ll keep to the key principles. First off, we’ll start with the bass itself. Where you play with your plucking hand will make a lot of difference in the sound you produce. If you play down by the bridge, you’ll get a much brighter and high-fidelity sound, although you’ll lose some of the low-end quality of your tone. If you play up by the neck or even over it, you’ll create a much warmer, thicker tone, but this compromises on…

Bryan, you recently released a video for ‘A Quickening/ Steiner In Ellipses’ to Youtube. How did you approach it? Rather than make a video for a nine-minute prog epic, which people could easily miss in their social media feeds because it takes a good 30 seconds or a minute to get started, I thought, ‘Let’s make art marry practicality here’ and chose two short songs to make videos. ‘A Quickening’ and ‘Steiner In Ellipses’ are both two minutes long, they segue into each other on the album, and they start instantly, so they were perfect for a video in these instant-attention times. You insert comments from social media users into the video, making it a very meta piece of work. Definitely! All social media is about people putting stuff in…

That’s a sweet bass that Vincent made for you, Jason. How did it come about? Jason:“Oh, bro. It’s perfect. Amazing. Vince had made three of those, I think, and I was like, ‘Are those for sale? They’re so beautiful, I’ve never seen anything like that!’ but he said, ‘No, they’re gone’. I was like ‘Damn it. Will you please make me one?’ and he did.” Vincent, talk to us about that bass. Vincent:“For NAMM 2020, I made all the bass models I ever wanted, about 10 of them, and posted about them on Instagram. I got a lot of good reactions, and Jason contacted me through Instagram and said, ‘Hey, I like what you do—we gotta make some basses’. It was very unexpected, and incredibly cool. The first bass we…

The Foo Fighters’ forthcoming album, Medicine At Midnight, is their tenth, which may surprise readers who still think of them as a pretty new band. You won’t have to be an established fan to like its nine songs—they’re recognizably Foo-ish in nature—but if you’re familiar with the stadium-rock quartet’s early hits, ‘Learn To Fly’, ‘Breakout’, ‘Times Like These’, ‘Monkey Wrench’, and the rest of them, you may detect a slightly funkier edge to the music than usual. “There’s no good adjective to describe the sound,” chuckles bassist Nate Mendel, a band-member since the former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl formed the group in 1995. “‘Funkier’ and ‘dancey’ fall short of describing what we’re trying to do. We’ll have to come up with a better word.” Given the new edge to the…

Behold our world-beating bass gear review section, where we bring you the crop of each month’s new, interesting or otherwise relevant bass guitars, bass amplifiers, bass cabs and bass effects. Occasionally we’ll review a guitar effect if it’s useful for bassists, but generally speaking, this zone is reserved for bass-specific gear. We take our reviews seriously. BPis the last English-language print magazine devoted solely to bass in the world, and we have readers all over the planet, so we’re responsible about our conclusions. If a product is worth your time, we’ll say so; if it’s flawed, we’ll make that clear. We’re not answerable to advertisers in any way, and our tests are independent of the views of musicians, manufacturers and distributors. When you read about a product here, you’re getting…

Price| $3300 (without Kahler bridge, $2999) Made In| UK Color| Orange, gloss finish Body| Swamp ash Neck| Roasted flame maple, 34” scale Neck Joint| Bolt-on, five-bolt attachment Nut Width| 40mm Fingerboard| Rosewood Frets| 26 Pickups| Delano SBC 4 HE/S humbucking pickups x 3 Electronics| Active East Uni-Pre 5 Controls| Volume (push/pull for active/passive), pickup pan, stacked bass/treble, stacked mid/mid-sweep, pickup selector switch, active/passive tone control, acoustic pickups volume, acoustic pickups tone Hardware| Kahler tremolo bridge, Hipshot open-gear Ultralite machine heads and Bass Xtender Weight| 9.7 lbs Case/gig bag included| Hiscox case Left-hand option available| No WHAT WE THINK Plus| Tone range is state of the art Minus| A little over-featured for some players Overall| An impressive alternative to the norm BP RATING BUILD QUALITY SOUND QUALITY VALUE…

I SPY... RYAN MADORA Dig into your favorite bass parts... and discover treasure! Ryan Madora is one of Nashville’s most sought-after touring and session bassists. Recent touring and session credits include Robben Ford, Kyshona Armstrong, and her instrumental trio, The Interludes. For the past five years, she has served as musical director for Bobby Bones and has played with Garth Brooks, Darius Rucker, and Carrie Underwood. In addition to instructing at Nashville’s campus of Musician’s Institute, Ryan has taught at Gerald Veasley’s Bass Boot Camp, Rock’n’Roll Fantasy Camp, and at universities across the USA. She has contributed columns to No Treble for over a decade and in 2019, published her first book, Bass Players To Know: Learning From The Greats. Ryan offers online education at TrueFire and through her website.…

Welcome! The humble speaker cabinet comes in all different shapes and sizes, from PA systems at front of house, floor monitors, our bass guitar cabinets and hi-fi, among many others. They all perform specific roles, with modern pro-audio manufactured to exacting standards to ensure the highest performance. Come on, Veall, surely they’re all just boxes with speakers inside them? No sir! The world of speaker and cabinet design is governed by some fairly complex parameters. Any well-designed system will have its drivers supporting the sound they make. Done badly, speaker design can leave the sound unbalanced, incoherent or, in the case of multi-way speakers, detached from one another. All right, you’ve convinced us. What do we need to know? For bassists beginning their gear journey, the first thing that often…

Graham Central Station, ‘Hair’ (1973) Five minutes of a badass bass-line from the man who invented the slapping style anchor his band’s debut album, and what hot minutes they are. Preaching a message of open-mindedness while his bass thumps along underneath, Larry Graham brings his blend of funk and R&B to the table in no uncertain fashion. The fact that Larry has played with the finest funk performers on the world—Sly & The Family Stone, and some upstart named Prince—reveals volumes about his enduring influence on our world.…

The life of the late Paul Chambers was short, but his influence on double bass in the world of jazz is huge. Chambers was born in 1935, and his first musical steps included jamming on the baritone horn and the tuba. By 1949, though, he’d settled for the bass, and three years later was learning his craft with experts from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. That wider musical appreciation was key to his understanding of the art of arrangement and instrumentation, and secured him places on tour with Bennie Green, Kai Winding, Wynton Kelly, and the Miles Davis Quintet. Chambers became a sought-after session player, and worked with numerous household names including Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, and John Coltrane. Noted for his perfect timing, gorgeous intonation, and unparalleled skill…

Recently, I’ve noticed some discussions on boiling bass strings to restore lost vitality. This old trope has been around since at least the Seventies, but it seems like years since I last heard it. Old myths die hard, but there is a reason that this myth has never become legend—it’s simply not true. Two primary factors contribute to strings’ decline, stretching and corrosion. Let’s consider how both affect the lifespan of your strings. Most bass strings consist of a core wire of hexagonal high-carbon steel, wrapped with nickel-plated or stainless steel wrap wire. This wire is wound onto the core under tension, and this tension changes over time as a string is tuned to pitch and then repeatedly struck, plucked, bent, and picked. When a set of bass strings starts…

A few months back, we ran our annual Bassist Of The Year competition, in which bass players from all over the world uploaded video clips of their skills. Our celebrity judges this time were Tracy Wormworth of the B52s, Living Colour’s Doug Wimbish, and former Kyuss bassist Scott Reeder. After they picked their favorite entries and the public placed their votes, our winner was the mighty Danny Sapko, whose entry impressed all of us with his excellent funk playing and intuitive feel for the groove. The slick fingerstyle that Danny showcased in his video clip encompassed all the tricks of the modern bass arsenal—strummed chords, the floating thumb technique, tapping and the expected slap and pop—while the line itself was catchy as hell. Although he made a point of showing…

DAVE SWIFT Juan, you arrived in New York from Colombia in 1984—is that right? SNOW OWL That’s correct, in early 1984. I was eight years old. DS And was that when you saw Jaco Pastorius, who was homeless at the time? SO Yes. It’s a very sad story, and it’s always hard to tell it. My mother was working at a store near the Blue Note, near the Washington Square park, and she asked me to give out flyers to promote the store. I was walking in the park and there was a guy there with a bass and a cassette player. He looked like he’d been sleeping there. He was screaming ‘I did this music. Do you hear this music? That’s me!’ He was boasting about how great this…

LAKLAND www.lakland.com $1349 This five-string Lakland may look like a familiar J-Bass, but look—there’s something a little different in the pickup department. Instead of a standard set of single-coils, Lakland have utilized a pair of Chi-Sonic Jazz units which claim to offer increased upper-mid focus, as they’re modeled on Hagstrom Bi-Sonic pickups, but with improved warmth and a rounder response. We ask—why reinvent the wheel? Build Quality Resplendent in a luscious Candy Apple Red finish over an ash core, the J-Sonic looks the part, with the very familiar offset body-shape, mint green three-ply scratchplate, extensive lower cutaway, and chrome control plate. The instrument feels substantial, weighing in at a sturdy 10 pounds, so it’s not surprising that there’s some headstock bias. Contouring at front and back is as expected, and…

Price| $2000 Made In| Indonesia Body| Alder/maple/alder Neck| Five-piece maple/mahogany, 34” scale Neck Join| Bolt-on, six bolts Fretboard| Rosewood, 21 frets, Graphtech nut Pickups| Reversed P-style split-coil Electronics| Active preamp Controls| Volume, 3-band EQ (bass, middle, treble/passive tone), active/passive switch Hardware| Lightweight open-gear tuners, Vintage Plus brass/steel bridge with strings-through-body option Weight| 9.5 lbs Left-hand option available| No Case/gig bag included| Gigbag WHAT WE THINK Plus| Tones, playability, cost Minus| None Overall| A very user-friendly bass with a tone range to die for BGM RATING BUILD QUALITY SOUND QUALITY VALUE…

Last month we looked at inversions, which are chords where the lowest note is something other than the root. Using the third, the fifth, or even the seventh in the bass—in other words, the lowest note in the chord—offers us a whole lot more interesting options as bass players. Developing an ear for, and a facility with, those shapes will also make us far more useful in a band, enabling us to contribute arrangement and composition ideas that will enhance the music we make together. This month, we’re going to take a slightly different route to extending these ideas. It’s one that bypasses a huge amount of theory and might seem, for that reason, to be overlooking a ton of rules and stylistic conventions about how and why chords work…

The value of any scale can only be appreciated in a performance environment. To some, pentatonic patterns can hold the key to a melodic Garden of Eden; to others, they can be a glossary of overplayed, bland vocabulary. From either perspective, adding a b 5 interval and upscaling a pentatonic shape to a hexatonic pattern is a complete game-changer. Try inserting a b 5 interval into a conventional minor pentatonic, and explore the newly created melodic tensions.…