Table of contents for November 2021 in Bass Player

Hello again, and I hope you’re doing well. It’s officially fall now, and my band Unkle Bob are ramping up our preparations for our next album session. I’m so excited for this record! This month’s assumption anecdote comes from California. The jazz double bassist and singer Sam Montooth has told me how, due to his young age, it’s often assumed by other musicians when he first meets them that he can’t play jazz. While his youth can sometimes give him an edge, because people assume that he possesses superhuman ear training ability—and who wouldn’t want that as a superpower?—he also says that it can be a drag knowing that he has to double his efforts, argue his case and ultimately prove those assumptions wrong. If he only came up against…

Ruth Goller’s career is based on a heady mix of jazz skill and punk attitude. Hailing from the Italian Alps, but based in London, she plays both electric and double bass. Over the years, she has featured on a long and impressive list of intriguing projects, from Acoustic Ladyland and its successor Melt Yourself Down, to The Golden Age of Steam, Metamorphic, and World Sanguine Report. As she’s always open to pushing the boundaries in all directions, Goller’s new album Skyllais a blend of improvisation, harmonic explorations and multi-layered vocals. Innovative and sonically fascinating, the album supports her reputation as one of the rising stars of the modern jazz firmament. Goller began playing the violin as a child, before being drawn toward the low end. Her range of bass techniques…

If you’ve ever shopped for higher-end or boutique bass guitars, you’ve undoubtedly come across the term ‘quarter-sawn’. It’s commonly used in product details to describe woods used for necks and fretboards. But what exactly is quarter-sawn wood, why do some builders use it, and why should you care? Quarter-sawn lumber, by definition, is wood that has been milled so that the angle of the annular growth rings of a board intersect with its face at or near 90 degrees. This can be observed in the end-grain of a board. Being a hygroscopic (moisture-absorbing) material, wood still moves after it has been cut and dried, expanding, contracting and even warping. Quarter-sawn lumber offers two distinct advantages over flat-sawn: It is more resistant to movement due to changes in atmospheric moisture, and…

The Who My Generation (1965) “I used to love ‘My Generation’. Every bass player quotes the bass solo in that song. It’s an incredible-sounding bass. Really raw, really rough. That’s the way my sound became when Sabbath started off. I like that raw, edgy sound rather than ultra-bassy. I wouldn’t even attempt to play this solo—ha ha ha! My bass playing is basic and not too fancy: I’m an average bass player. A lot of people told me that I’ve influenced them the way that [these five players] influenced me, and I get a lot of emails telling me how good I’m supposed to be, but you can’t sit down and say ‘Oh yes, I’m great!’” Cream Fresh Cream (1966) “I didn’t really know anything about bass until I went…

Formerly grunge stalwarts, the Californian quartet Stone Temple Pilots reinvented their sound with their third album, 1996’s Tiny Music... Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop, with that record now recognized as a career turning point. Featuring three chart-topping hits—‘Big Bang Baby’, ‘Lady Picture Show’, and ‘Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart’, the album was recorded in a luxurious house in California’s Santa Ynez Valley rather than a conventional studio, and was produced by Brendan O’Brien, who had also tweaked faders on STP’s two previous albums, Core (1992) and Purple (’94). The group—Scott Weiland (vocals), Dean DeLeo (guitar), Robert DeLeo (bass) and Eric Kretz (drums)—continued to plough a rich seam of inspiration until the premature death of Weiland of a drug overdose in 2015, and are still recording high-quality…

Brought up in Israel and resident in New York City, bassist Adi Meyerson released a well-received jazz album called Where We Stand in 2018, but takes a different inspiration for its follow-up, I Want To Sing My Heart Out In Praise Of Life. It’s a six-part collection inspired by the work of the avant-garde visual artist Yayoi Kusama, a recent exhibition of whose work suggested songwriting themes to Meyerson. The songs, as the bassist tells us, were inspired in part by her experience of synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the human senses overlap: In Meyerson’s case, she sees colors when she hears certain pitches, making Kasama’s artwork a musical as well as visual experience. “Honestly, if your music is inspiring and fun, then I’ll play it” Tell us about…

“I bought my first bass in my small-town music shop. The owners were probably shocked to sell it” As a little girl, I always had a collection of different instruments—a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboard—crammed into my tiny bedroom. I would spend hours playing and writing songs after school and recording songs into a small recorder I had. I first picked up the bass around 11 years old. My older brother had started playing, and I remember sneaking it from his room into mine to try it out. I loved it, and in grade seven l started playing bass in the school band. Somehow, many years later, I haven’t put it down—and have been lucky to play bass as a career my whole life so far. My first bass was…

Price| $299 (street price) Made In| USA Features| Analogue SansAmp tube amp emulation circuitry (two modes), 2 x Drive controls, 2 x Level controls, Bite switch, active post-EQ (+/- 12dB), compressor, Octafilter, Fuzz and Chorus controls, chromatic tuner, 0.25” 4.7megOhm input, input pad for active basses, XLR out, 0.25” low impedance out, speaker simulation defeat switch Power 9V DC power supply (included) with interchangeable international plugs Dimensions| 12.5” (L) x 2.75” (W) x 1.3” (D) / 318mm x 70mm (W) x 30mm (D) Weight| 12.5oz WHAT WE THINK Plus| Solid build, portable, excellent tone options and extras Minus| More affordable alternatives exist Overall| It’s the SansAmp you can put in a bass case—a splendid bit of kit BP RATING…

“When I switched to bass from guitar, I was terrible—I’d never thought about bass! I was looking over at Tony Iommi and playing the root note of whatever chord he was playing at the time. “The first time I ever played bass was at a gig. I couldn’t afford a real bass, so I just tuned the strings down on a Telecaster and they were flapping all over the place. I just played A, B, E—no runs whatsoever—and I had a lot of catching-up to do, especially because in those days we only had one gig a week if we were lucky. I just spent my time practicing and listening to Jack Bruce. “I started out on Fender Precisions: They were my main basses on the first three Black Sabbath…

“Everybody in my family played music. If I didn’t have an instrument, it felt like I wasn’t supporting them” Charnett Moffett has enjoyed a long and productive career in the jazz world, inspired by the example of his late father Charles Moffett, who played drums for Ornette Coleman. A Juilliard alumnus, Moffett has played with the Wynton Marsalis Quintet, Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Arturo Sandoval, Harry Connick Jr, Bette Midler, and Coleman himself. His current album, New Love, which features guitarist and vocalist Jana Herzen and drummer Corey Garcia, is his seventeenth as a composer, and is out now. Talk to us about your new album. The idea behind New Love is to bring a little light and joy to the world right now when it’s in such…

$779.99 Founded in 1999, the US-based Michael Kelly Guitar Co. was launched primarily for the manufacture of acoustic basses and mandolins—instruments that the company felt were badly underserved by large-scale manufacturers. Guitar and bass lines soon followed and in due course, Michael Kelly earned a reputation for crafting high-quality instruments with an expansive sound, and the build and appearance that one would expect from a boutique manufacturer. This year, the company released the Pinnacle four- and five-string models, with a view toward offering basses with more robust tone-sculpting controls and a unique, custom shop appearance. It is an impressive range, and given the broad array of features included, our expectations are high. We pile straight in... Build Quality For evaluation purposes, we request a five-string—and as we extricate it from…

Price| $849 Made In| USA Color| Poseidon Green Power| 250 watts @ 8 ohms Impedance| 8 ohms Speakers| 1 x 12” custom designed Neodymium driver and 1 x phenolic tweeter with integral phase plug; custom crossover with variable tweeter control Connections| 1 x Speakon socket, 2 x 0.25” jack sockets Dimensions| 385mm (H) x 488mm (W) x 462mm (D) / 15.2” (H) x 19.2” (W) x 18.2”(D) Weight| 25 lbs WHAT WE THINK Plus| Easily transportable, build quality Minus| High pricetag Overall| An assured winner BP RATING…

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 her website. www.ryanmadora.com…

Welcome! Continuing our focus on the how and why rather than just the what, one of the things that a lot of us really struggle with when learning an instrument is how to meaningfully measure our progress. How do I actually know that I’m getting better? And what do I do with my observations about my own playing that will help me target my practice at measurable progress outcomes for my playing? Music is a tricky beast in this respect, largely because in research terms, the most important outputs are qualitative, not quantitative. We could spend our time measuring how fast we can play a particular line, and indeed there are occasions on which reaching a particular tempo for a given passage is absolutely essential for the music to work—particularly…

It’s just a neck—it holds the frets while we play the notes, right? Well, no. The neck is the most precisely engineered part of any bass guitar. It is easy to underestimate the tolerances in manufacturing that are required to turn a well-playing bass into an exceptional one, and necks come in all shapes and sizes, so let’s unravel the sales jargon. Okay Veall, what types of bass neck are there? When it comes to bass, we seem to assign a whole range of adjectives about their sound and playability. We’ve all seen adverts for instruments that ‘play like butter’, right? Let’s start with a ‘fast’ neck—in other words, one that you can navigate quickly and easily. These are often slim and set up for a ‘fast action’, which means…

Here at BP, we don’t pander to fashions in the bass world, and we don’t attempt to stay ahead of the curve. Far from it—we like to celebrate the cheesy and the tacky as much as the awe-inspiring when it comes to the low end. This month we’re tipping our hat to the mighty Cher, or Cherilyn Sarkisian, as literally no-one calls her, but we’re not bothering to examine her earlier career, when her music possessed some vestiges of cool. The Sonny & Cher material was definitely listenable if you squinted a bit and tried not to think about it too hard, especially after seeing Groundhog Day for the eighteenth time. No, for today’s dose of Cher we’re heading straight to the motherlode of cheese—the late Eighties, when basses were…

Hello again, bassists! Leading on from on-stage pedalboard placement in my last column, I’ll be sharing some more handy tips on how to maintain and optimize the setup of your pedalboard for live shows. The pursuit of every pedalboard user is to have something that is reliable, efficient, easy to use and that ultimately sounds great. In order to achieve this, we must first start with power—as this will affect the response of your pedals, as well as how clean the electrical signal is. Ideally, you want a power supply unit that provides multiple isolated outputs, preferably one for each of your pedals. This not only minimizes the chance of electrical hums and hisses, but also ensures that your pedals are optimally powered. Try to avoid daisy-chaining pedals with a…

If you or I ever reach 72 years of age, we will no doubt be spending a lot of time ignoring everything that people tell us about bass guitars, and refusing to acknowledge anything other than the tried-and-trusted gear that we’ve been playing for the last 50 years. Not so the great Geezer Butler, or Terry as no-one calls him, who—despite a long and productive career as a master of the low end—is still breaking down barriers in bass. “I’ve just bought an Ibanez six-string bass, so I could play it like a guitar,” he tells us, “but then I progressed to a seven-string to have the full range, tuning the bottom string to B.” He’s not merely noodling around on this beast, either. “I’ve come up with lots of…

How many bass-themed films have you made, Nick? Lost Backstage is the third one. My first film, Beneath The Bassline, came out in 2018, and last year, we did Walking The Changes, which was about the worlds of double bass and jazz. What are your goals as a film-maker? The idea is to showcase what it’s like to be in the room with the world’s greatest bass players. In the case of the new film, Lost Backstage, it’s a collection of responses from these musicians when I ask them for a bizarre anecdote from the road. I ask them this question between regular interview questions, if you see what I mean, and over the years I’ve ended up with over 40 hours of footage. In this film, I got that…

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| $779.99 Made In| Indonesia Body| Swamp ash with poplar burl top Neck| Five-piece maple and walnut, 34” scale Neck Joint| Bolt-On Nut Width| 38.5mm Fingerboard| Ebony Frets| 24 medium jumbo frets Pickups| 2 x Rockfield MDC5 Electronics| Michael Kelly 3-band preamp Controls| Volume with push-pull for active/passive modes, pickup balance, three-band EQ, 2 x mini toggle switches for coil split Hardware| MK diecast tuners, MCN5 bridge Weight| 9.5 lbs Case/gig bag included| No Left-hand option available| No WHAT WE THINK Plus| Robust tone sculpting options, price Minus| No hardshell case offered Overall| A versatile, custom shop-level instrument at a mid-range price BP RATING…