Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

Hi everyone, Pete Tambroni here for a quick teaching tip.
I find when I teach German bow, the frog often slips to the base of the thumb. This limits arm and wrist flexibility.
To help the student keep the frog near the base of the fingers, I tell them to rest it on their ‘handlebar callous’. [...]

I stumbled across this excellent post from Sounds & Fury recently from a study covering what typically happens to students who graduate in the bottom 40% of their classes once they get to college:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds [...]

Besides the oft-used Copland (or Copland-esque) music for evocation of Americana, music is an intrinsic tool during the political campaigns, and let’s face it - the 2008 campaign practically started directly after the 2004 presidential election. It is amazing that the only time that classical music is used by politicians is to punctuate dramatic points [...]

I had the pleasure of checking out the University of Illinois bass quartet recently (October 22, 2008). This ensemble is comprised of University of Illinois bass professor Michael Cameron and U of I doctoral students Garold Fowler, Hunter Capoccioni, and Alex McHattie, and they were in the midst of doing a tour of top-tier high [...]

The following is a short excerpt from the E-Bass Line Newsletter from the International Society of Bassists. Receiving this newsletter each month is one of the many benefits for ISB members, including special rates on instrument insurance, the excellent journal Bass World, the paper edition of the Bass Line, and much more! Check out the [...]

For more on my thoughts about music schools (and what it really means to pursue a career in music these days), check out my book Road Warrior Without an Expense Account.
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Applying to music school? Think about the following points during the application process–they’re in order of most important to least important (in my opinion, at [...]

Double bassist, blogger, and entrepreneur John Grillo has been a pivotal part of Contrabass Conversations since its inception in early 2007. John was one of our very first guests on the podcast, and his role quickly grew to that of collaborator and co-host. John and I have now co-hosted many of the Contrabass Conversations podcasts, [...]

The following is a short excerpt from the E-Bass Line Newsletter from the International Society of Bassists. Receiving this newsletter each month is one of the many benefits for ISB members, including special rates on instrument insurance, the excellent journal Bass World, the paper edition of the Bass Line, and much more! Check out the [...]

Many of our Contrabass Conversations guests hold faculty positions at prominent universities. Actually, most (if not all) of the guests we’ve had on the program have done at least some university teaching, so this is not going to be a comprehensive list but rather a means to get you started learning more about some of [...]

In addition to featuring nearly 100 interviews with seasoned professional bassists on Contrabass Conversations, we have also released several innovative pedagogical resources which have proven to be quite popular. These types of projects are what makes this kind of content distribution (over the Internet, free of charge, accessible to anyone worldwide) extremely exciting and useful:

Orchestral [...]