Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

It’s great to see classical music leaders like Deutsche Grammophon enter the modern age of digital distribution.  Alex Ross wrote a post yesterday highlighting some of the features of this new online store, and I received some correspondence from DG representative Bill Hunt as well.  Bill writes:
DG will be the first classical record label [...]

Mustech.net blogger Joseph Pisano recently put out a list of his favorite blogs relating to music education, and it was great to see doublebassblog.org opening the list.  Thanks, Joseph!  I really enjoy this blog, checking in regularly through my RSS reader to catch up on the latest in music technology.
Here are a few of [...]

Folks have asked me before about the ‘related posts’ links that I usually include in the footer of each blog post, inquiring whether I use a program to generate these.  If only!  While there are some WordPress plug-ins that automatically create related links (one of the reasons why I will likely move this blog over [...]

You never know what is going to get popular online.  You spend your days toiling endlessly, writing thoughts and observations about the music biz, editing audio and video, and trying to bring together a community of instrumentalists, and what gets popular?  What gets over 1000 views in a matter of hours?  Freaking cats dancing to [...]

As my schedule eases up (in some ways) for the remainder of the fall, I am finding the time to take care of the extremely important but mind-numbingly tedious tasks that have accumulated on my to-do list.  The longer one blogs (and podcasts, and does all of the other online stuff that I do), [...]

We just wrapped up our 10 part virtual lesson series with Lyric Opera of Chicago bassist Andy Anderson, and putting these episodes into one easy-to-use player seemed like a good idea. The player below will play the series from episode 1 through episode 10–just use the forward and back arrows to skip through the [...]

We’ve had a really enthusiastic response to our Ranaan Meyer interview episode (featuring a healthy amount of music from the excellent band Time for Three) and video episode of Ranaan playing his tune I’m Tryin’.  In fact, we’ve been getting great responses to all of our recent (and previous) Contrabass Conversations projects, including our Orchestral [...]

Matt Wengerd (104 Weeks blog) pointed out to me yesterday that AllAboutJazz.com was using the Contrabass Conversations logo on their site for a series on jazz bass players. Jacque Harper (Chicago Bass Ensemble) sent me the following screen shot to demonstrate the context in which it was being used:
Now, speaking as someone who spends [...]

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 [...]

Blog readers will notice that the ‘Listen to the Podcast’ section of the sidebar has been revamped, and I’d like to take a moment and briefly explain what this new podcast interface does. With the CrowdAbout widget I just installed, you can skip to selected areas of a podcast. Check it out and [...]