Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

This week’s Contrabass Conversations episode features an in-depth analysis of the double bass orchestral excerpts most commonly requested at auditions. Double bassist (and regular Contrabass Conversations guest and co-host) John Grillo discusses each of these excerpts–stylistic considerations, differences in articulation and bow strokes, and suggestions for effectively learning them–and then performs them. [...]

This is a post from double bassist from Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music student Nicholas Hart. Nick will be contributing weekly posts to the bass blog about life as a music student in one of the nation’s most exclusive programs. I think readers will find this different perspective on the double bass world and the [...]

Double bassist and blogger John Floeter recently put up an excellent post on his bass studio blog containing advice on how to get in shape fast after taking some time off. Recently taking a few weeks off for my wedding and honeymoon, I can definitely attest to the usefulness of this advice. John [...]

This is very cool.
Peabody Institute bass faculty members Jeffrey Weisner (National Symphony Orchestra), John Hood (Philadelphia Orchestra), and Paul Johnson (Baltimore Opera Company) have started a collaborative blog. This new site, which can be found at peabodydoublebass.blogspot.com, is really a great idea. What an excellent way to let students (current, former, and [...]

Bassist Andrew Harmon (of That’s My Cone! fame) sent me links to two extremely useful repositories for freely downloadable scores. The first (which I have used for research purposes before–extremely useful) is the International Music Score Library Project. Founded in 2006, this project is an attempt to compile all public domain scores into [...]

Greg Sarchet (Bass Club Chicago, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University) for several years has handed the following list of recommended texts out to his incoming double bass students. These books touch on all sorts of issues relating to musicians and serve as a course for developing an aesthetic sense, which is something [...]

Bill Harrison from PlayJazzNow.com has made some sample tracks available to Bass Blog readers. Just click the downloads tab to check out these tracks for yourself. At PlayJazzNow.com there are tracks available for all instruments. These particular tracks allow the jazz bassist to practice walking bass lines and solos.
Put them on your iPod [...]

This week’s Contrabass Conversations episode features the second half of our interview with double bassist Guy Tuneh, conducted over a distance of thousands of miles. It was a real pleasure to get to sit down and chat with Guy–he’s a warm, intelligent, and passionate individual, and these traits come through in his speaking just [...]

I just installed a very cool new feature just underneath the podcast interface. The EveryZing widget allows you to search all podcast episodes for search terms. This service is a speech-to-test transcription and search service which works incredibly well, and since the audio being searched is previously cached, results come back fast–basically as [...]

 

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This week on Contrabass Conversations we bring you an interview with string teacher and double bassist Peter Tambroni. Peter has written a book titled An Introduction to Double Bass Playing, and he has many valuable ideas regarding double bass pedagogy. Arizona bassist Robert Matheson is also featured on this episode. Enjoy!
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CBC #32 [...]