This is a very interesting photo that double bassist John Tuck forwarded to me. You can see that someone decided to take the body of a bass and use it as the soundboard for a harp. I’m not sure how well that works, but it sure looks cool.

This photo is especially cool to me because my fiancee (and sometime co-host for Contrabass Conversations) plays the harp! We also both like to drink Harp and Bass beer, respectively. We are nerds.

My blogging buddies from Singapore (Emily and PY) have started a site for their bass quartet called D’Bassists. They have a really slick slide show created by Slide, which is a great Web 2.0 application for making animated slide shows that can be incorporated into websites.

Long-time Bass Blog readers (late 2005/early 2006) may remember that I used to have a giant slide show scrolling across my blog from the same company. Mine looked kind of bad, but the D’Bassists have a really good-looking slide show, so check it out (as well as their posts, of course) at dbassists.blogspot.com. I also added them to my Bass Blog list in the sidebar.

I am in the midst of a whole bunch of web projects right now, many of which I think readers will find very cool. I’ll elaborate a little more in the next few weeks, but I’ll have some very interesting things to announce in terms of resources for this site.

I have spent the last several hours poring over scads of Wordpress themes, widgets, and plugins. I just installed Wordpress 2.1 on two domains, and I am hopelessly addicted, poking around and adding all sorts of stuff to the sites.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my car explosion story, which will be coming out in the next couple of days.

Finally, if you have a minute, head on over to the virtual master class tracks and leave the folks posting their playing some comments.

I’ve got a crazy weekend, so I have to be brief today.

If you’re in the area, come check out the Elgin Symphony play Sibelius 5 and the Elgar Cello Concerto. Daniel Hege is conducting and Alicia Weilerstein is the soloist for the Elgar.

Some great comments are coming in for tracks on the Virtual Master Class Project, but we could always use more. Please check it out and comment to help out other musicians. You can always leave anonymous comments.

E-mail me any submissions you have for the above project! MP3s are fine. If you ave big files, let me know–I have a workaround.

Lastly, visit kittenwar.com for your daily fix of cat cuteness. It is a massive time sink, but it is extremely fun.

Double bass virtuoso Francois Rabbath will be holding a master class in Chicago on Tuesday, April 3 at 1 p.m. This class will be held in Buntrock Hall at Symphony Center. Symphony center is located at 220 S. Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. Click here for a map of the area and to get directions to the hall.

Parking in the area can be a challenge, so your best bet is probably to use the Grant Park South garage. Enter the garage on Michigan Avenue from Congress Street.

Additionally, you can use chicagoparkingmap.com to help parking options.