Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

This is part 2 of a guest post by double bassist Jean-Yves Bénichou. You can read part 1 of Benjy’s post here. Benjy is bi-national, being a citizen of both the United States and France. He has lived in France for the past 30 years and has been a member of the Strasbourg [...]

I wrote a two-part post last summer on what to look for when purchasing a bass. I have since retooled this post into a full article and have submitted it for publication, and I’ll let readers know when and where they can find this article when it comes out.
Double bassist John Floeter put [...]

This is a guest post by double bassist Jean-Yves Bénichou. Benjy is bi-national, being a citizen of both the United States and France. He has lived in France for the past 30 years and has been a member of the Strasbourg Philharmonic since 1985. He studied double bass at Temple University with Edward Arian and [...]

Double bassist Peter Lloyd has been hired to teach at Northwestern University starting Fall 2007. He will be replacing double bass instructor DaXun Zhang, who has accepted a faculty position at the University of Texas-Austin. For some background on this institution, you can read my previous thoughts on the history of Northwestern University’s relationship with [...]

 

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It is my pleasure to bring you this great interview with Pittsburgh Symphony principal bassist Jeff Turner for this week’s episode of Contrabass Conversations. Jeff has excellent advice for musicians, and he reflects on his early years on the instrument in this very engaging interview. You will also be hearing a double [...]

Matt Heller put out a thoughtful post last week on his blog hellafrisch about Paul Ellison’s teaching style. You can visit Matt’s post here, but I’ll put out a few teaser quotes.
Matt paraphrases Ellison:
First there are the things that you know you know - that’s probably a small section, maybe 10 or 15 percent. [...]

John Floeter put out a great post on his bass studio blog recently about his thoughts and observations on freelancing and auditioning. This post is quite relevant to many of my writings about the freelance business (which you can find under my Articles link).
Here are a couple of key points from this post:

I’m in [...]

Double bassist John Floeter (Northern Illinois University bass instructor, Grant Park Symphony section member) has really been turning his double bass studio blog into an excellent resource. In addition to offering up technique downloads for students (via Box.net–a great service for distributing these kinds of resources), he has started to write some longer-form posts [...]

I blogged about this site last summer, but I was again just spending some time on DoubleBassGuide.com, a great resource for players of the instrument out of Germany. The site is operated by Jonas Lohse, who also maintains a double bass blog. It has articles, a gear guide, and a great bass links [...]

 

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This week’s Contrabass Conversations episode features an interview with and music from Chicago Symphony bassist Rob Kassinger. Rob’s musical interests span many genres and include both the electric bass and the double bass. You will learn about Rob’s early years on the bass and how working in jazz and rock settings led to [...]