Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

There are two predominant double bass pedagogical methods in the United States today. The older, established double bass method here is without a doubt the New Method for String Bass by Franz Simandl. This tried and true double bass pedagogical tome methodically takes the beginning double bass student up the fingerboard, half-step [...]

Michael Hovnanian has been writing some posts on his CSO Bass Blog that would be very helpful to classical double bassists. He has been providing some fingering solutions for pieces that the Chicago Symphony has been performing recently.
Check out his Mahler 7 post or his Kodály Concerto for Orchestra post for some examples.
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Wired News put out a recent story on a musical instruction web app recently demoed at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. It is called In the Chair, and it sounds like a real step forward for music education. Check out the demo video:

This is the sort of thing that I would [...]

I have been using Google Book Search nearly every day since it was launched. Google is attempting to accomplish with printed text what they have done with the internet, which is to have every bit of information available at one’s fingertips. They still have a long way to go to reach this goal [...]

There is a very famous documentary from 1969 called “The Trout” featuring a group of legendary musicians assembling and performing Schubert’s famous quintet.
The musicians featured are:

Daniel Barenboim, pianoItzhak Perlman, [...]

This is a repository of orchestral excerpts for the double bass. Click the player for each excerpt to practice along with it. Click the name of the piece to download it as an MP3 file (right-click and choose “save as..”). There will be a short (three second) ad at the beginning of each file if [...]

This is an older article from Polyphonic.org, but it is illuminating reading for those thinking about a career in music or those wishing to understand the life of a professional musician. Douglas Fisher makes some great points here. The article reads:
Among the highly educated and skilled professions, orchestra musicians make some of [...]

Michael Hovnanian of the Chicago Symphony recently started a bass blog. Michael was my teacher at Northwestern University for my undergraduate and graduate degrees, and it is really great to see him start a blog! I just added his blog to my Blogroll in the sidebar of this blog.
In addition to playing in [...]

If you are interested in learning more about this subject, check out the follow-up post to this article here.
I have a B.M. and M.M. in Double Bass Performance from Northwestern University. Although I had a good financial package for my undergraduate degree and had a full-tuition fellowship or my graduate degree, I still owe [...]

Jason Video Tracks

Jason Heath explains the double bass
Jason performs B.B. Wolf by Jon Deak

Jason performs Capriccio No. 2 by David Anderson

Here is a video of highlights from my recent recital on Gary Karr’s former “Amati” bass:

Jason Audio Tracks
Failing - A Very Difficult Work for Solo String Bass

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Massenet Meditation from “Thais”

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Monti “Czardas”

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Eccles Sonata mvt 1

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Eccles Sonata [...]