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Double Bass New jazz bass video tutorial series

#61
The second video is up now:



Apologies for the length, but there was a lot of information to cram in there, and as per request I wanted to include a short playing clip somewhere up front. If the playing examples of the finger /beat permutations get too tedious, I think the most important point about the usefulness of this kind of practice is made near the end, at the 11:30 or 12 minute mark.
 
#62
Masterful playing and presentation, Chris!

You're using the terms upstroke v downstroke differently than in bowing. It looks as though you're describing the bobbing motion of your wrist bone as it moves in a sine-wave-like pattern as you pluck, in which case I'm inferring that a down stroke is a power stroke, and the up stroke is a rest or rebound stroke.
 
#63
Thanks - it's hard to describe, but by "downstroke" I really mean the weight of the arm falling through the string. It's visible on the E and A strings, less so on the D, and hard to see on the G string because of the angle of the arm coming across the bass. But playing that way *feels* like a downstroke even when it doesn't look like it from the outside. You wouldn't actually play in any one of these patterns for very long in actual musical practice because accenting is one of the most free aspects of the rhythmic game in jazz. Which - IMO - makes it that much more important to be able to accent various subdivisions with different fingerings. The main aspect of using this "method" (if it can be called that) is that it establishes a connection between the musical articulation and the physical motions that ultimately produce it. And working on those upstrokes can be very physically liberating when they start to match the basic timbre of the downstrokes, especially when playing tempos.

Back I was studying piano, I had a lesson once with Lynne Arriale where we spent the whole lesson throwing the weight of the arm into the musical accents while playing lines; her point was that playing in that way added an authority to the accents that wasn't there before, and opened the door to a much more fluid way of playing while still playing strong. It was a real eye opener. She's a very small person who gets a VERY big sound.
 
#65
Chris Fitzgerald said:
...Thanks - it's hard to describe, but by "downstroke" I really mean the weight of the arm falling through the string. It's visible on the E and A strings, less so on the D, and hard to see on the G string because of the angle of the arm coming across the bass. But playing that way *feels* like a downstroke even when it doesn't look like it from the outside...
Click to expand...


i like the way you incorporate the ideas of "gravity" and "weight" and "inertia" and "ergonomic movement" into this lesson... bravo!

"falling through the string" describes it perfectly for me.
 
#66
Chris, cheers for referencing Lynne. She taught me more than I can tell. Playing with her and Steve was life changing. Did she ever tell you her theory on key centers? We used to take a tune and record it in all 12 just to see where the song came out the clearest. Brilliant all around.

Thanks again for posting coherent and well informed pedagogy. This should be a sticky, as it answers so many of the recurring questions that show up here.
 
#67
chicagodoubler said:
Chris, cheers for referencing Lynne. She taught me more than I can tell. Playing with her and Steve was life changing. Did she ever tell you her theory on key centers? We used to take a tune and record it in all 12 just to see where the song came out the clearest. Brilliant all around.
Click to expand...

I only played with Lynne and Steve a few times on bass, but it was always a great experience. She didn't call anything through the cycle, but did have a few tunes in keys other than the norm. She and Steve were so musically tight together that playing with them was easy - just relax and fall into the flow. And it was a great experience for me to play with them after having absorbed a lot of pianistic lessons from her beforehand. I'm glad to hear a positive word about her from another player as I hear her get slagged a fair amount on the internet and sometimes in groups of (male) jazz musicians when they start talking trash. She has worked very hard to get to where she is, and even if people don't care for the style she plays, I wish they would at least be honest enough to admit that she's very, *very* good at it. I don't doubt that trying to forge a career in an almost exclusively male-dominated field has been incredibly challenging for her, and I admire her for overcoming so many of these obstacles. Like it or not, she is following her own path and her own musical voice, and we could all take a lesson from that.
 
#68
Chris Fitzgerald said:
The second video is up now:

Click to expand...


It was all good - very nice video Chris!

I felt it was really good to concentrate on right hand sound production, as it's something we often take for granted, when there's so much else to think about in trying to play Jazz.

I do find that a good feel and sound, can endear you to fellow and potential band members - much more than any complex note choice or tricky substitutions!

You have a very calm presence and following these exercises felt a bit like meditation! :p
 
#70
JGoldberg said:
In the first video you spent a lot of time describing the mechanics of the down stroke. What is happening to your fingers and wrist when you subdivide during an upstroke?
Click to expand...

Great question, and it illustrates one of the regrets I had about the time limit for youtube. It's hard to describe in words, but I'll try, since more detail is needed on this:

- the fingers themselves don't really do anything different at all in terms of their shape. On both upstrokes and downstrokes, the fingers of the right hand move a bit closer to the palm while rotating against the fulcrum of the fixed thumb. Lynn Seaton has a wonderful and funny demonstration of this where he describes holding the four fingers together and waving them like a seal would with its flipper (Lynn adds sound effects :D) . (My take on this flipper is that it includes the wrist and the hand, where I believe that Lynn's is more in the fingers - either way, I got/adapted a lot of this from watching/studying him)

- having said the above, the right wrist actually provides most of the motion on the upstroke, but it's subtle. Rather than having me waste a bunch of words on it, try this:

1) With all four fingers of your right hand, tap slowly on a table or desk in front of you using your whole arm at roughly mm=60. It will make the sound "SLAP".
2) Next, subdivide this in half to where you tap lightly on the upswing of the arm; this should make the sound "tap", so you're basically going SLAP-tap-SLAP-tap etc. Notice how relaxed the "tap" feels as compared to the "SLAP".
3) Divide again into triplets (SLAP-tap-tap.....) and 16ths (SLAP-tap-tap-tap...) until it feels like a natural motion. Notice that at the triplet/16th division levels you really have to pace the upswing of the arm so as not to be done with its upward motion before you have tapped two/three times; this is part of the choreography of the movement that I believe helps the player get more physically in sync with the music.
4) Now get in your normal bass playing position with the more-or-less perpendicular fingerboard, and do the same exercise slapping the fingerboard with a free hand while observing the arm and wrist motion. After this, anchor the thumb and try to recreate the motion against its fulcrum point while plucking the strings. Go very slowly at first, as it's a very precise balancing motion at each subdivision, and a motion that is too big or too small will make the time rush or drag.

1-3 above can also be done by holding the left palm upward and immobile in front of you and clapping/tapping on it if you prefer.

Does that help?
 
#76
chicagodoubler said:
Chris,

We could start another thread about the prevalent misogyny in jazz....

FWIW, Lynne can cut the bulk of her naysayers to shreds.
Click to expand...

Feel free if the spirit moves you. :)

I only mentioned it because I get tired of people who either don't like the style of her music or who pick up on some of her personal eccentricities and try to translate that into "can't play" or "can't swing" or whatever. I always enjoyed playing with her - and with Steve, whether she was on the hit or not - and at no time while the music was happening did the question of "can this person actually play at a really high level" ever cross my mind. Usually, I felt like I was trying to play up the level they were putting out, and trying to contribute to the music that was happening. And some of the lessons I learned from her are still paying dividends today.
 
#77
I was thinking about the "flipper technique" while I was practicing tonight, and it occurred to me that it's the same schema I learned while playing percussion in the 6th grade; the first beat occurs when you strike the drum head with a stick, the second beat occurs when you use the kinetic energy transferred to the stick as it rebounds off of the drum head.
 
#78
Jazzdogg said:
I was thinking about the "flipper technique" while I was practicing tonight, and it occurred to me that it's the same schema I learned while playing percussion in the 6th grade; the first beat occurs when you strike the drum head with a stick, the second beat occurs when you use the kinetic energy transferred to the stick as it rebounds off of the drum head.
Click to expand...

I never studied drums so i can't comment on this specific reference, but yes, I think we're talkng about largely the same thing. I've found parallels to the beat subdivisions discussed in the video on every instrument I've ever played. With drums, I know that there's a direct parallel to the standard jazz ride patterns where you hear a lot more coming out of the cymbal than you can see the arm moving to produce. On piano, it's all about the wave motion of the elbow (also actually coming from the shoulder, as all elbow waves must). On guitar when picking, there's a much smaller motion of "throwing the wrist" into accent patterns. For brass players, there are tonguing patterns for playing divisions:

Quarter: Ta
8th: Ta-ka
Triplet: Ta-ka-tuh
16th:Ta-ka-ti-kuh

All of these patterns aim at accomplishing the same thing - the nesting of unaccented notes within a larger grouping, where the primary physical energy expended is on the first (accented) note, like throwing a stone into the water. The downbeat is the stone, the subdivisions are the ripples. Not everyone agrees with this as a pizz bass technique, but I think it's one of the more important technical concepts to introduce early to promote a relaxed playing motion and feel.
 
#80
Just got to see this, and it's another winner, Chris. Thanks again for putting in the time and effort. I don't have much to add to the comments from far better players than I, but I would say that the production values place your videos well ahead even of most of the commercially available ones that I've come across -- simple, clean and clear.

One more point: I have just found that when I try to use more than 2 fingers, it turns out they're all thumbs. :hmm:
 

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