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Most Difficult Music You Ever Learned

#101
per the OP: probably some fast bop back in the day. i wasn't really "learning" those tunes, as in trying to memorize them, but the BL/star would count 'em off so fast it was sometimes a matter of just hanging on.... :wideyed:

i've written a few things that were tricky, but i eventually made some sense out them. i've had reading gigs where i started a tune or two from the "stumped position." :laugh:
 
#102
The Dead's "Box of Rain" was tough. It's through composed (no repeats) and there are no clearly defined sections. No riff or ostinato. I had to memorize it because I performed it in concert settings with a recording artist and charts would have been kind of uncool. I had to play along with the recording many times to get it in muscle memory.
It was written by Phil Lesh, and the pianist in the band teased me that "you can tell it was composed by a bass player." :rolleyes:
 
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#105
Hands down that would be 'Be Happy' by Mahavishnu Orchestra. We played it in a funk band I was with in the early 90s. Best part about it was that it pushed me to improve my playing, but the worst was that the one or maybe two times we played it live, it went over like a lead balloon. The audience wanted James Brown. :D
 
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#109
Worked on this one in HS band for all 4 years:



We were really good my senior year. Travelled to a national band competition and took a silver medal for it. At one point, I had the Bb clarinet, BBb bass clarinet, and BBBb Contrabass clarinet parts all down cold. Love how they interleave!
 
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#110
Joshua Pickenpaugh said:
King Crimson's "Discipline" on Chapman stick
Click to expand...

I just recently heard a Tony Levin interview where he admitted that he re-tuned his Stick for that song just to make the tritones easier to play with one finger!

ryco said:
"Hello Jeff" Stanley because of sheer speed; fortunately had a turntable that had 16rpm on it.
Click to expand...

I tried that back in the 1970s, but at 16rpm the pitch of the bass wound up lower than what my pathetic stereo speakers could reproduce! So I never really learned it ...I don't suppose you have a transcription? Would love to see that riff notated.


The most difficult music I ever learned is a composition by Steve Norton called "Sphere Of Nuance" (although it appears on a live CD on the Tautology label under the title "Fear Of Laurence"). It's difficult because:

- the pitch material is strict 12-tone serialism, so it uses the full chromatic with no tonal or triadic motives to latch your ear onto
- it uses the full tessitura of the 6-string bass, with lots of wide multi-octave leaps
- it is rhythmically angular and asymmetric, with a meter change nearly every measure
- the tempo is fast AF

When you hear the whole thing put together it sounds amazing, like if Bad Brains covered a Karlheinz Stockhausen composition, but it was an absolute bear to get under my fingers and into my ears. I don't think I've ever had to woodshed a single piece as much as I did that one.
 
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#113
Sternodox said:
I played in a Roky Erickson cover band and those were the easiest (and coolest!) basslines I ever played. Roky sure had a way with chord progressions.

Then I joined a Zappa cover band.

Oh dear! Everyone else in the band reads. I don't, sadly. So, essentially, I had to memorize everything. "Holiday in Berlin" took me 6 weeks to get right. And I had to sing "Willie the Pimp" while playing bass, because I was the only voice who could get that Beefheart gravel.

My proudest moment in almost 5 decades of playing was getting all the way through our first gig. It was so good. We ended up with a 28 minute version of "King Kong."
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Be glad it wasn't a Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band Troutmask Replica tribute band you were in. ;)

I would say the the biggest challenges I ever got musically playing bass was my time as bassist for a math rock band, even if I mostly had free hands as to what to play, but a lot of odd meters/time signatures, unusual rhythms and unconventional complicated song structures to keep track on.

Did result in odd meters/time signatures practically being second nature to me to this day, and overall being in that band I believe was responsible for propelling my musical development forward, sort of cracking some musical code for me mentally.

I literally once at a rehearsal with this band feel something in my brain snap when learning a part for a new song, and I believe from that point I was liberated from the repressive bonds 4/4 Western music fascist dictatorship.
 
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#115
dougjwray said:
The Dead's "Box of Rain" was tough. It's through composed (no repeats) and there are no clearly defined sections. No riff or ostinato. I had to memorize it because I performed it in concert settings with a recording artist and charts would have been kind of uncool. I had to play along with the recording many times to get it in muscle memory.
It was written by Phil Lesh, and the pianist in the band teased me that "you can tell it was composed by a bass player." :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
So Anyway, Congrats on the commitment to getting it memorized.
I listened to it a couple of days ago and couldn't begin to grasp a pattern or where it was going.
It's included in a GD music book that I've got, and I still can't see a pattern that would work for me to play it at a gig.
 
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#116
I'd only been playing bass for barely 3 years and I joined a band that had a Pat Travers fetish. We pretty much did all of his live Go For What You Know album along with the Intro/Sweet Jane and Rock and Roll by Lou Reed. It was a bitch having to cop both Mars Cowling and Prakash John that early on.
 
#117
Just played a cover of Kate Bush's "Night Of The Swallow" tonight. We did leave out the instrumental break and last chorus repeat but other than that, played it as close to the original as feasible with an acoustic duo.

Most difficult ever, though, has to be the cello part of Vivaldi's concerto for three violins which I played on DB. Got the sheet music, practiced, realized there's no way I can play at tempo but I'll show up and fail and I'd rather be told I'm not good enough than just say I can't do it and look like I just don't want to do it. Then... it turned out that with two of the violinists being in their early teens (which I knew from the beginning but never thought it mattered) we're doing it at about 80% of the "real" tempo and not only can I play it, the conductor told the others they need to be more like me and actually pay attention to the dynamics. Heh.
 

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