I've been playing music increasingly seriously for 25 years, the last half of that devoted to bass. I played upright in high school a little, but nobody really showed me how to do it. I just had a Simandl book or something. The last three years, I'd been playing a lot of fretless bass guitar. A year ago or so, I got a cheap electric upright. And now, thanks at least in part to all the information here, I bought my first real bass this week. It is so amazing to see it in my house. My house is very small, so it pretty much dominates whatever room it's in. Or maybe I just spend a lot of time staring at it for no reason! I got a nicely set up Christopher DB403T hybrid, and transferred the TI Spirocore Weich strings from my electric upright. It is SO easy to play. Probably too easy, and I am losing out on tone and volume. I can play all my Charlie Parker and Jaco Pastorius stuff on it, which I could definitely not do on the EUB. Here is a clip of me playing the head to Visitation, a Paul Chambers song I have the sheet music too but have never heard.
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cstump/...visitation.mp3
Playing in tune in general is my big immediate future practice area. My fretless had nice little lines on it. The EUB was impossible to play except in the lower positions where muscle memory was enough.
I two-tracked this with my K&K Bass Max pickup and a vocal mic nearby. Some EQ on the mic to put it back close to flat. But it still doesn't pick up the lows. Neither does the pickup. In real life, it is very impressive (to me).
I played yesterday with piano + guitar, and today with piano, both times unamped. I need to work on finding a comfortable way to stand for hours on end, and the technique that produces big volume easily. I get it sometimes, but other times I am fighting. On electric bass, I only recently came around to the intimacy level where I felt like I was getting this big effortless sound. The difference technique makes to upright is pretty shocking. I have actually taken a few lessons, the first since I was playing clarinet 20+ years ago, and the first on bass at all. We work on technique, and traditional jazz bass playing. I theoretically know "everything" but putting it into practice in real time in a way that satisfies me might take another few decades!
(hopefully, learning to walk really slowly through doorways, and to be hyper-aware of the exact location of every protruding object in a 7 foot spherical radius will come fairly soon)
