Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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While digging through my old e-mail recently, I came upon this snippy exchange between management and musicians regarding compensation for cartage. This is the sort of thing that really makes my blood boil–cartage is compensation paid to musicians who must load a lot of gear in and out of a venue. The philosophy behind [...]

It’s been a great year of blogging for me personally, and I’m really excited to have reached the phase of development for both Contrabass Conversations and doublebassblog.org that I’m at currently. We’ve got a large daily readership (we were pushing 2000 daily page views for these sites plus Arts Addict during the spring) and [...]

I’ve got story for you, and I promise it’s true!
When I was getting started as a freelance musician at the tail end of my masters degree, I was quaking in my boots about my future prospects. After all, I was regularly buying CDs at Borders and Barnes and Noble from former Northwestern doctoral music students. [...]

Hydraulic stages are both a blessing and a curse!  I’ve played on them in a  variety of venues, and while they’re usually a blessing for stage and pit logistics in multi-use halls, they can yield some amusing (and potentially disastrous) unintended results.
Up, down, up, down…
I have played performances with a variety of groups in Milwaukee’s [...]

 Check out the gig commuting cost calculator by Drew McManus here and determine if you should really be taking that gig.

A recent feature in the Chicago Tribune (Sunday, April 13, 2008 by Jim Mateja) about the actual operating costs per mile for a variety of different vehicles caught my eye–not surprising considering how much [...]

 

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I’m pleased to be able to share this interview with Robert Meyer, one of our most experienced and interesting members of the double bass community. Robert has had a long and illustrious career on the double bass, working for over 50 years in most of the major orchestras in London (including the London [...]

San Diego Symphony Principal Bass Jeremy Kurtz (we’ll be interviewing him on Contrabass Conversations in the near future) passed along a link for a free tool for Macs created by a violinist in the San Diego Symphony.  Looking for an accurate tempo?  This simple application will give you an accurate tempo reading, which is useful [...]

When you think about it, isn’t it amazing that a group of musicians can ever play together in a symphonic setting? Honestly, having all those different instruments, from tuba to tympani, with all those methods of sound production, from blowing to plucking, situated across either a vast resonant expanse of stage or a subterranean [...]

Even in a ‘classic’ art form like music, one that existed well before the advent of electricity, we performers now completely and utterly depend on the power grid for our performances.  While hospitals and other such foundational services may have emergency generators, I’ve certainly never seen a concert hall with one.  When the power goes [...]

Audience members may be completely unaware of this, but there is a lot of wacky stuff going on in a pit that would probably never happen in an onstage performance. There’s just something about being located 6-10 feet below floor level that unleashes something in musicians. At least, it does in some [...]