Wednesday 29 August 2012

How To Build A Pedal Board For Less Than £30!







Wednesday 22 August 2012

Double Thumbing Dojo

A student of mine recently asked for some help with double thumbing and as this is a pretty major point of interest across bassists I thought I'd post my lesson up here! This isn't an area I've spent a lot of time working on but I've gotten the foundations down pretty well.

If you're new to double thumbing then I'd say start here with these basic exercises which are designed to make sure you've got the basic technique down. Practice these as slowly as you can bare and if you're not getting a good clean tone on the down AND the up stroke then stick with it before you move onto anything quicker.



The two grooves I've written are based around constant 16th note patterns which need you to keep your thumb going while using your left hand to mute the beats being played as dead notes.




Sunday 12 August 2012

Lick of the month #3

Welcome to LOTM number 3! This months lick is a 2 for 1 special using some nice ideas I've pulled from a transcription of 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' I was working on but shamefully got defeated by! There are some monstrously quick runs in this solo which I'll hopefully finish off one day when my ears catch up with the sax shredding on display. But waste not, want not, here's some of the licks I did manage to get my chops onto.



I've wrote these licks up to work over an Eb blues. The first bar starts around the 9th and then descends an Eb- arpeggio. The second bar is based around F# major, the relative major of Eb-. The G that sets off the second lick is a major 3rd  of Eb- which gives us a nice bit of tension before resolving the lick on an F#, the minor 3rd.