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Since everything about music is subjective, pretty much the only way you can decide whether you're overplaying or not is to listen back to what you played and whether you like it. In order to do that, you need some kind of standard to gauge yourself against. All of the best players I know do a...

In the scheme of things, scale modes aren't important because the information contained in them isn't any different than the various other ways of remembering information about harmony. They aren't unimportant either, they're just one of a bunch of different ways of looking at the same...

I just replied to some other thread with this same advice so maybe check that out, but the key to having better ideas about what to play over any set of changes but particularly over jazz charts, is to have transcribed so many excellent walking bass lines that they are swimming in your head in a...

The biggest issue with approaching improvisation, particularly in solo context, is that a great deal of what you need to be capable of doing is playing in a group setting. We're of similar ages, and when I was studying jazz as a kid it was really common to get yourself a copy of some of Jamey...

Your post just happened to show up as the first in the most-recent-posts list, and when I read it I realized it was weird timing since this is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. The thing that has really been weighing on me heavily during the last few years is how many really...

It's very difficult to judge where you are landing with respect to any beat when you're practicing. The best advice I ever saw for this was in Wayne Krantz's books and columns where he talked about leaving a tape recorder going all the time while he was practicing, and then going back and...

To clarify what I think dreamadream99 means, when I think of sight reading I think of being in an ensemble where everybody has just been handed a chart that none of us have seen with the expectation that we are going to play through it together. Obviously this is probably not a very common thing...

why not just negotiate a return that is reasonable for both parties

I think that one of the traps players fall into is that they have enough awareness of a thing to know that it's widely thought of as having virtue, but their picture of why the thing is important is not clear enough to know how to what the real purpose of doing it is and how to use it. I...

willie weeks take on this is my top 5 lines of all time, so being busy is cool and I like this line a lot. I think the only note I'd have has nothing to do with the performance but would consider revising the bass compression in the final mix, busy sounds better without transients.

What I'm going to write here is largely redundant with what a couple of responses, so apologies to those users as it drives me crazy when people just paraphrase something I just wrote, but this is a thing that has come up so often with students I have worked with and I struggled a lot with it...

I'd start with a 4 just because its a lot more fun trying a 5 for the first time after years of playing a 4 than vice versa. In other words, imagine you're given the option to get an extra finger, or to have one lopped off.

I do a lot of last minute sub gigs in cover bands so this is something I've been doing regularly for years, and after several years of doing it I found a pattern that I've used pretty much exactly the same way ever since. First, I get the set list and find a recording of each tune in the set...

I wouldn't begin to know where to begin processing your journey so I will leave that to you. However, about half the students I work with present with what is a clearly earnest desire to do everything the best they can from the start. Often they're very nervous because they're hoping to be...

It sounds like your thinking here is guided by fear and anxiety. For example, it sounds like you're worried that if you spend time studying classical method will it hinder your jazz playing, or if you choose the wrong bow grip will it stunt your development, or if you make the incorrect left...

I'm not a huge classical music cat but I have really come to appreciate solo bass rep, especially a lot of the new up and coming players. This Sarasate piece that Lauren Pierce arranged and played is nuts:

Memorizing the original bass line note for note is exactly the right way to get the sound of an unfamiliar style of music into your head. You are essentially learning a new language, which means that you have to assemble a collection of phrases that you can use in common situations. The best way...

You mentioned having exercises that are two-pronged in a sense, in which there are takeaways in the areas of both technique and theory. I can remember a time in my life maybe 20 years ago or so where I was also hoping to develop in both of those areas simultaneously, and while I still have never...

I think it is probably a question that you'd have to pose with the person you'd be studying DB with. I know some teachers who will happily give you any number of lessons at any time if they have the slot open, but I know some others who don't like to teach people unless the lessons are...

dig some of his recordings with Scary Pockets, a sort of sister project of Pamplamoose. They have a rotating cast of LA bassists, its kind of a whos-who of funky beasts. Sam Wilkes, Daniel Aged, and Joe Ayoub are some of my other favorite killer regulars. They made hundreds of covers, hard to...

My advice would be to memorize it as soon as you can. It's one of those things like North/South/East/West that comes up over and over again in harmony, and although the diagrams usually have a bunch of related stuff, like the major and minor key signatures for each key, if you start just...

I think the absolute best thing that you can do in the beginning is to memorize repertoire. I've met so many aspiring jazz bassists who will: 1. Buy a fake book 2. Read some scattershot combination of stuff on harmony, like some chord/scale relationships, or one of those books about how to...

An exercise given to me a long time ago that helped tremendously at getting a mental model of the fretboard goes like this: This is less tedious if you have some kind of play-along thing like iRealB that can make a background accompaniment for you. I probably have mp3s of it somewhere...

Cancellations with less than 24 hours notice, student pays for most or all of the fee. There is always a lot of grumbling when a teacher needs to enact a policy like this, so its a good idea to email all the students and say "beginning <some date a month from now> our new policy will be <blah>"...

the best advice I ever read about playing in time was from Wayne Krantz, who described how he had a little portable tape recorder that he used to record everything he was practicing that had to do with time and feel. He would record himself for a few minutes, then go back and listen to it to see...

very late the thread here and apologies in advance if I've duplicated parts of the responses, but a few things that I advise students when transcribing double bass stuff: * find a way to use headphones. obviously it can be a pain with DB having to get your instrument mixed with the headphones...

I spent probably 12-15 years just transcribing walking lines and memorizing standards. I started out pretty much in complete ignorance of harmony, but going through all that memorization, playing the tunes with groups of people wiser than me, which inevitably include a lot of conversations about...

I thought there was something wrong with my Tonedexter II after my initial training session, since after completing the training, I couldn't figure how to hear the actual wavemap sound and was just getting the audio from the mic. Then I gave the mic a couple of taps. Wow. I'm really curious to...

Imagine that maybe fifty to a hundred people all like you needed the very specialized skills of one person to get their thing fixed, and that maybe half of them woke up every morning wondering how long it was going to take them to fix your thing in particular. These cats are artists. They're in...

I've been transcribing for decades and my observation is that the longer I do it there are fewer situations where I feel like I need to slow stuff down, but there are still times when the audio quality is bad or I'm having trouble hearing something and the slow down stuff helps. So in a sense if...

I would think of this undertaking as being one of a few possible projects. First, you could think of it as doing a transcription. Obviously bass transcriptions of Donna Lee are easy to find, but it's not a bad idea to pretend that they aren't and transcribe it anyway. I don't always write out...

yep, and just to clarify, the melody is almost always going to be ranging all over the place compared to the bass line, and you don't want to try to follow it closely, but it can be helpful to pick a few notes out of the melody (especially the ones that are really emphasized) and use those as...

My reading in the ledger lines improved a lot when I started learning to play in thumb position on double bass since you spend a lot of time in the etudes up in that range, and sometimes in alto or tenor clef (brutal imho). Anyway although the material is not helpful from a method perspective...

I think it was you and I who were talking about the exercise of building a walking line based on the melody, and I think the example I gave was to use some tones from the melody to make a sort of scaffold to build a walking line off. In the head on this tune though, Doug Watkins is playing chord...

man I left a cake of rosin in my bag one time in a way too a gig in Fredericksburg and it turned into something resembling maple syrup by the time I reached into the pocket to take it out, I'm still finding little flakes of it years later.

definitely add Donny Hathaway "Live" to that playlist, starting with "What's goin on"

I watched a cool video recently that is another reminder that real book changes have to be taken with a grain of salt, especially on monk charts- might be helpful in this context:

This is a difficult thing to teach people because as one of the other responses mentioned, it's just a thing you become able to do after you spend a lot of time playing in an ensemble. But I think I might at least be able to tell you kinda what is going on in my head and hands when I do it. BTW...

It's a little tricky to put into words, although I think that both of the ideas you mentioned there kinda capture aspects of it. I think if I was trying to illustrate it in a lesson, I would start by writing out the first four bars of the head and looking at what pitches the melody is playing on...

I approach it the same way as any other set of changes in the head, which is that I focus more on the melody than the changes. The changes are useful information but the melody is driving the bus.