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Double Bass Honest playing assessment request from my bass peers.

Aragorn35016

Aragorn35016

Jul 3, 2004
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Arab, Al.
youtube.com
#1
Not sure if I'm putting this in the right forum, but I've crested the year and a month mark of playing the double bass. Also hit 30 of my 40lb weight loss just to play better, which I'm pretty proud of! I wanted to see if I could get some feedback from my more experienced peers on if I'm on track of where I should be at practice a minimum of a hour a day (barring sickness or being out of town). Again I appreciate any honest critique, I got no pride, it wouldn't drive me to try harder! :D
 
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#5
jallenbass said:
Good pitch, tone, and time. Now you can start putting in crescendos, and diminuendos as well as making some sections louder or softer. Dynamics in other words.
Click to expand...

Thanks! Yeah I've been trying to improve my dynamics as well as my vibrato, but I still haven't got the gates of my mind to open up to it completely yet. for my dynamics its more trying to figure out how to quantify loud and quiet. and for vibrato from my bass guitar days I can tremolo all day long, but for some reason its a little bit more for my mind to process shaking my hand back and forth :roflmao:. Ive been trying with a metronome and can vibrato 8th notes semi consistently at around 210 bpm, but get physically tired of doing it after about 45 sec and have to reset.
 
#8
Nice clear tone and the intonation is solid too. You look like you're leaning over a bit. I don't want to mess with your posture if you have a teacher working with you on it, but if not, maybe experiment with standing a bit closer with your weight evenly distributed between your feet, or maybe bringing the bass up a little bit. I can't see everything, so take my suggestions with a huge pile of salt.
 
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#9
Mark_T said:
Nice clear tone and the intonation is solid too. You look like you're leaning over a bit. I don't want to mess with your posture if you have a teacher working with you on it, but if not, maybe experiment with standing a bit closer with your weight evenly distributed between your feet, or maybe bringing the bass up a little bit. I can't see everything, so take my suggestions with a huge pile of salt.
Click to expand...


Yeah I've probably got it a little low but my bass has such big shoulders that it gives me a little more forearm clearance to go into thumb position. I do have a teacher who's a great player, but he really never talks much about posture or much of anything past the initial "this is how you do it" phase, past that he's not super engaged and pretty liberal on his pedagogy and doesn't really give me weekly assignments just throws all kinds of stuff at me to try to sightread. It's kind of just up to me to choose what I work on out of the books I have or he loans me. Im hoping that this changes on down the road when I get out of my reading hang ups.
 
#11
Aragorn35016 said:
Not sure if I'm putting this in the right forum, but I've crested the year and a month mark of playing the double bass. Also hit 30 of my 40lb weight loss just to play better, which I'm pretty proud of! I wanted to see if I could get some feedback from my more experienced peers on if I'm on track of where I should be at practice a minimum of a hour a day (barring sickness or being out of town). Again I appreciate any honest critique, I got no pride, it wouldn't drive me to try harder! :D
[This invalid link has been removed]
Click to expand...
That's very impressive, especially the thumb position section. Your intonation up there is almost better than it is in lower positions. For one year of work, this is really good. I'm also working on this piece but haven't gotten all the way through it. Are you working out of the Vance book? I'll echo what others have said. Start to address dynamics. I'm about ten years in but I really date my serious study as beginning about five years ago. In fact, it was encouragement from people in this exact forum that got me to get out into NYC and find opportunities to play my bass, as opposed to just at home or in lessons. There are no shortcuts to getting better at this insane contraption. Just hard work. I use Modacity to help organize my practice. Big help. Keep it up!
 
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#12
Alexis Duntov said:
That's very impressive, especially the thumb position section. Your intonation up there is almost better than it is in lower positions. For one year of work, this is really good. I'm also working on this piece but haven't gotten all the way through it. Are you working out of the Vance book? I'll echo what others have said. Start to address dynamics. I'm about ten years in but I really date my serious study as beginning about five years ago. In fact, it was encouragement from people in this exact forum that got me to get out into NYC and find opportunities to play my bass, as opposed to just at home or in lessons. There are no shortcuts to getting better at this insane contraption. Just hard work. I use Modacity to help organize my practice. Big help. Keep it up!
Click to expand...

Thanks! It's an arrangement my teacher made. For some reason 3rd position is always a little off for me, I've been playing some vomit exercises I got from watching Lauren Pierce, and more recently a harmonic exercise from a Jason Heath video to try to better calibrate. My thumb position is coming along until I have to straight sight read something new. That treble clef quickly causes me to short circuit! I use Modacity as well. It's an awesome tool and the free version does everything I need it to do! I'm about 80 percent confident in Progressive repertoire vol 1, I own and have played through a couple of things in volume 2 but Im not sure Im ready for it. I use the vade meccum and have daily practice the position surveys for F D G and C as well. I also have the Zimmerman book but its alittle over my head, I've been working on etude 1 for 8 months lol! I also play through this sight reading book I picked up on amazon by John Kember and David Stark, and recently a Carol Kaye book that my teacher let me borrow. If I make it to hour two I work on some stuff out of the evolving bassist, particularly the autumn leaves transcription in the back. Sometimes I wonder if Im spreading myself too thin and not actually completing a song or piece lol!

CF0E96EC-04ED-4F98-BD73-53B156E55FCB.jpeg
 
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#15
Looks great but also heavily weighted to technical things at the expense of repertoire. I used to do an hour of technical and then found I didn't have much gas left in the tank for actual music. I am also turning 50 next month and not a spring rooster. But still, these days for technical stuff I cut it off at 30 minutes, usually something like this:
7.5 minutes long tones
7.5 minutes two octave arpeggios (maj7, dom7, min7)
10 minutes Boardwalkin by Hal Robinson
5 minutes Petracchi or other thumb position etudes.
Then I move on to repertoire, both arco classical stuff and pizz jazz/Latin etc. A good day is 90 minutes repertoire and 30 minutes technical.
 
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#16
For some reason your video will not play on my IPad. So I tried it on a phone, still did not play.
From what others have said, you are obviously doing great.

I have to congratulate you on dumping 30 lbs. This is no easy task.
Well done on the weight loss!

Life is better playing music and feeling good about one's self :)
 
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#17
Aragorn35016 said:
Not sure if I'm putting this in the right forum, but I've crested the year and a month mark of playing the double bass. Also hit 30 of my 40lb weight loss just to play better, which I'm pretty proud of! I wanted to see if I could get some feedback from my more experienced peers on if I'm on track of where I should be at practice a minimum of a hour a day (barring sickness or being out of town). Again I appreciate any honest critique, I got no pride, it wouldn't drive me to try harder! :D
[This invalid link has been removed]
Click to expand...
Hey, you sound good! Nice work.

Just some technical things you might want to think about. Your wrist on your bowing arm looks pretty locked and rigid. How are your bow changing exercises going? Can you get a continuous sound when you're playing a long note and going from up to down, or down to up, bow? If not, you might want to loosen up your wrist some.

And, at times, it looked like your left elbow was dropping down, forcing your hand into a kind of cramped position. Maybe it's not an issue now, but when you start using vibrato, you'll want that elbow up so that your wrist can rotate freely.
 
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#18
CaseyVancouver said:
For some reason your video will not play on my IPad. So I tried it on a phone, still did not play.
From what others have said, you are obviously doing great.

I have to congratulate you on dumping 30 lbs. This is no easy task.
Well done on the weight loss!

Life is better playing music and feeling good about one's self :)
Click to expand...

I don't know why but it's doing that to me as well, yet I can play it out of my google drive no problem. I thought it might be a .mov thing so I switched it to an mp4 and it did the same thing. Must be an apple thing.
 
#19
Carl Hillman said:
Hey, you sound good! Nice work.

Just some technical things you might want to think about. Your wrist on your bowing arm looks pretty locked and rigid. How are your bow changing exercises going? Can you get a continuous sound when you're playing a long note and going from up to down, or down to up, bow? If not, you might want to loosen up your wrist some.

And, at times, it looked like your left elbow was dropping down, forcing your hand into a kind of cramped position. Maybe it's not an issue now, but when you start using vibrato, you'll want that elbow up so that your wrist can rotate freely.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback! Oddly I stay fairly loose when I'm doing bow exercises, but I tend to seize up when I'm focusing on not playing a sour note. Thanks for pointing both that and my elbow drop out! I'll start to try to relax and get the elbow up!
 
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#20
I appreciate everyones input, the DB forum is a Godsend! I appreciate all the professional working bass players that take time to give us newbies some advice! Another critique request, one of the reasons that I haven't left progressive repertoire book 1 is two pieces (Irlandias and Bagatelle) particularly the Irlandias, Ive been playing these two for 6 months, and still can't keep from scratching the hooks, especially the later hooks on the open D and the thumb position A. I'm kind of at my wits end, and Ive played them so much that I want a release from these etudes but Im so OCD that I can't move on! :banghead: Can you guys take a look at this and tell me what the heck Im doing wrong here? Im probable rushing because I started to get frustrated just trying to record it, and I hit a note off here and there because I raised my end pin and I'm having to recalibrate. Again I appreciate it!

John

[This invalid link has been removed]
 
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