Author: ChiTownRonOnBass

I suffer from the common bloggers’ malady of inconsistency. Here we are more than seven months after my last blog post. Let’s try again…

Today is Sunday. A rainy Sunday where I am. The start of a new week. Sundays are days when I typically have nothing on my calendar. This is an opportunity to spend more time than usual on musical stuff. Today I’ll attempt to do that. In the queue are:

A Patitucci melodic etude. I’m working my way through the book attempting to do 2-4 etudes per week. If I can do three this week I’ll be 1/3 of the way through the book. I’m doing this on my fretless bass.

The Courante from the second Bach unaccompanied cello suite. The version I’m working on is the Sterling transcription for double bass. I made some changes to the transcription based on the original cello part but keeping it in the key that Sterling wrote his transcription in. I’m doing this on my fretted bass.

A chord etude from the second volume of the Berklee method for guitar. Yes, I do spend some time with an instrument other than bass. I’m doing this on my Stratocaster.

As is common, I’m setting a goal of writing here at least once a week. Sundays seem like a good day to do it.

My current work on bass revolves around a few different things. I’m working on right hand technique, specifically muting. I’m also working through a pretty massive online course that’s going to take a while. I’ve been working on it for months and I’m not yet halfway through it. That’s okay, I’m a patient man. I’m also doing work on pieces. Some J.S. Bach stuff and something else more modern. Those pieces also include recording so along with the bass work I’m also learning about recording with the digital audio work station on my computer. There’s a lot to learn there.

It’s been a while and as the year comes to a close I’m thinking about what to do better for the next year. I’m gonna start with this blog. The commitment I’ll make here is to post at least once a week. And I’m not gonna wait until the new year starts. I’m starting now.

I’d really like to make Sunday the day I commit to posting but that’s yesterday so I’ll start that this coming Sunday.

What am I working on? Some guitar stuff and some bass stuff. The bass stuff can be found on my SoundCloud. It’s a bit (actually quite a bit) disorganized right now but that’s another thing I want to work on come 2024. More details on that later.

The guitar stuff is off the grid. It’s not as big a part of my music work as bass right now. I don’t see that changing but I’m finding that working on two instruments is better for me. The instruments are similar enough that they aren’t completely separate worlds but for me they have different foci.

So here goes. By the end of 2024 I aim to have at least 56 posts plus whatever is here now. Here’s to a better year next year…

This week I started working on a piece that I have already worked on before. Three years ago. I was probably three months into playing fretless bass at the time. I’m going back to this piece (and some others) because I like it and it’s been a while since I even looked at it, let alone played it.

Not too long after I started learning to play the bass guitar I made it a habit to record the material I worked on for my lessons. So I have a recording of the piece I’m coming back to. And after working on it for a week I went back and listened to my recording of it from three years ago. It was interesting.

In some ways, I’m amazed at how good some of it sounded. I’m also amazed at how bad some of it sounded. The tone is really great. Nice fretless sound. On the other hand, it’s apparent I recorded it to a click. And the intonation in some parts is really sketchy.

Aside from it being interesting to hear where I was bass-wise back then it also gave me some ideas about what to do better as I work on it now.

So, my advice: record your playing. Not for an audience but for yourself.

A few months after retiring I decided to pursue music as an activity. I spent some time on the internet and bought a few books on bass playing. But it quickly dawned on me that I would do better taking private lessons.

When I started looking for a teacher I wanted to find one who was also a performer. I really lucked out with my choice and I’m still studying with him today. He has a large number of students, plays in multiple orchestras (on upright bass) as well as in jazz and metal groups (on electric). (I frequently joke that he’s the hardest working man in show business…)

A few years later I decided I also wanted to play a chordal instrument (you can play chords on the bass but I was thinking piano or guitar) so I started guitar lessons but I have those lessons half as frequently as my weekly bass lessons. That too has proven to be a good idea.

Aside from the educational benefits, lessons for a non-performing aspiring musician like me serve the purpose of accountability. Not that I don’t come to lessons unprepared at times but when I do it’s a non-musical lesson that reminds me I have to get back on track.

YMMV but for me lessons are one of the main reasons for progress in my musical journey.

I’ll admit it – I’ve never really worked as hard as I should have on ear training. Most of my early music experience revolved around playing written music. As a music major in the early 1970’s we were required to take classes in aural skills. I never really spent time on those classes, to my detriment.

In my current musical endeavors I’ve finally realized the error of my ways with respect to developing my ears. And so now my ear training journey will begin. I’m starting with an ear training app – Beato Ear Training. I paid the money and now I’m going to start working on it. I also purchased another ear training course but I’m going to start with the Beato program.

My plan is to spend half an hour each day with the app. We’ll see how it goes.

In other news, G.A.S. (gear acquisition syndrome) has struck. In my April 2, 2023 post I talked about my two fretless basses, one 4-string (which I really like) and one 5-string (which I like less). Well, I decided I really want to only have to deal with one fretless bass so I have acquired the 5-string version of my 4-string fretless, an Ibanez SRF705. I am starting to get to know that instrument. And now I’m thinking of parting ways with my previous fretless basses. What’s the opposite of G.A.S.?

For the first few years of my bass journey I played only 4-string bass. But after a while I had progressed to working on cello music in my bass lessons. Eventually I got the bug to move to 5-string bass. I now consider myself to be a 5-string bass player. The only vestige of my 4-string days is my Ibanez SRF700 bass. I do also have a 5-string fretless bass (Gary Willis signature GWB35) but to tell the truth I don’t like it as much as my 4-string SRF700 so I only use the GWB35 when I need the extended low range. For example, when I record 4-part bach chorales I’ll play the lower parts (bass and sometimes alto and tenor parts) on my GWB35 and the upper part(s) on the SRF700.

I also am pretty much an Ibanez player. All the basses I currently play are from that company. I even bought myself an Ibanez T-shirt. I really like the sound and feel of instruments from that company.

For me, 5-string is the perfect bass. I can’t see myself moving to more strings than 5, although this bass is intriguing to me…

I haven’t looked at my site on the web in a while and I got kinda horrified at how it looked with all those ads. So I’m moving to an ad-free site…

(copied from my ad-infested blog on April 2, 2023…)

I started learning to play bass guitar a few months after retirement. After a couple of years or so of doing that with a four string fretted bass (G&L L-2000) I got it into my head that I wanted to get a fretless bass. Besides really liking the sound of the instrument (which started a long time ago when I saw Pat Metheny on his Watercolors tour back in the 1970’s. His bass player on that tour was Eberhard Weber, whose sound I fell in love with), I figured it would be harder musically and in particular would force me to develop my ear. That was one of the things I was after in my musical journey.

At first my teacher discouraged me but I persisted. I bought an Ibanez SRF700 fretless bass. My teacher express skepticism, especially since it had an unlined fretboard. So far I’ve been doing pretty well in the fretless world. My main instrument is still a fretted bass but every week I spend some time on the fretless. Well, most weeks anyway.

The main thing I’m working on now is 4-part Bach chorales. I play and record four tracks in my DAW (initially GarageBand and now Logic Pro). I am working through the Reimenschneider book. Some months ago I also acquired a 5-string fretless so I use that in addition to my Ibanez on these pieces. I’ll have more to say about my 5-string journey in a future post.

I have collected my top ten recordings of these chorales to date in a playlist on SoundCloud.

(copied from my ad-infested blog, originally posted on March 27,2023…)

I was thinking about what a subtitle for this blog would be. Something like “A retiree’s return to music.” Something like that. Music is something that, before retirement, I hadn’t thought about that much for a long, long time. Decades. But upon retiring I decided it would be one of my main pursuits. I didn’t want to retire and just sit around. I wanted to be learning stuff. Using my brain.

There was a time when music was a big thing in my life. It started in fourth grade with the clarinet. I don’t remember too much about those days. I don’t even remember what happened to my clarinet. But in high school clarinet became bass clarinet. To be specific, E♭ contra-bass clarinet. I don’t remember exactly how that happened but I do remember being drawn to low reeds. By senior year I was also playing baritone saxophone in my high school’s jazz band.

After high school came college. I was told that I couldn’t major in bass clarinet – I would have to major in clarinet. I didn’t like that idea so after some discussion the college people told me they needed bassoonists and if I could learn enough to pass the audition I could major on that. Hmmm…

That sounded interesting. So I found a local bassoon teacher and went to work the summer before freshman year of college learning how to play that new (to me) instrument. I did pass the audition and made it into college as a bassoon major. Sadly, I was clueless and aimless and after three years I had dropped out. There were still some efforts to keep music a part of my life but they faded away. Music, at least playing music, slowly ended for me.

Now decades later I’m back at it, working on learning how to play bass and doing other musical things. That’s what this blog will be primarily about.