Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

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Ian Hallas, principal bassist for the Midwest Young Artists Symphony Orchestra (and my student for the past six years) is seen here performing the second movement of the Bottesini Concerto in B minor with his high school orchestra in Northbrook, Illinois. This was recorded live on October 29, 2007. Notice the low B extension [...]

International Society of Bassists President and Ball State University Bass Professor Hans Sturm and I got together recently and filmed a chat about the Rabbath left hand position technique. Hans does a great job explaining the concepts behind this technique, and I hope that folks out there will benefit from this video. It is [...]

I recently got a chance to play around with one of luthier Chris Threlkeld-Wiegand’s double basses. Chris used to work at Robertson and Sons in Albuquerque, New Mexico, building extensions with capos (like the ones you see on the Contrabass Conversations logo). He now runs his own business in Iowa City called the [...]

I’ve blogged before about Vito Liuzzi’s performance of the Divertimento Concertante by Nino Rota, posting video of the first two sections in earlier blog posts (that annoying 10 minute limit on YouTube videos really gets in the way with classical music–one of the reasons that I use blip.tv for the podcast video material).  This video [...]

Bass blog contributor Benjy wrote a wonderful comment after viewing the Hans Sturm videos about the Rabbath technique that we’ve been posting here. Since comment can quickly disappear under the radar here (due to the daily avalanche of new content), I thought that it would be a good idea to take a moment and [...]

Ian Hallas, principal bassist for the Midwest Young Artists Symphony Orchestra (and my student for the past six years) is seen here performing the first movement of the Bottesini Concerto in B minor with his high school orchestra in Northbrook, Illinois. This was recorded live on October 29, 2007. Notice the low B [...]

International Society of Bassists President and Ball State University Bass Professor Hans Sturm and I got together recently and filmed a chat about the Rabbath left hand position technique. Hans does a great job explaining the concepts behind this technique, and I hope that folks out there will benefit from this video. It is also [...]

International Society of Bassists President and Ball State University Bass Professor Hans Sturm and I got together over the weekend and filmed a chat about the Rabbath left hand position technique. Hans does a great job explaining the concepts behind this technique, and I hope that folks out there will benefit from this video. [...]

The amazing bassist Dean Ferrell will be doing a solo bass performance in Berlin on Tuesday, November 6th, and any bassists , students, teachers, and fans of amazing double bass performance art should consider attending if they can make it.
We blogged an hour-long video of Dean Ferrell performing as Captain Tobias Hume (footage from the [...]

Yesterday we released the first part of our video about the Rabbath left hand position system, and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback already.  We’ve got a couple more parts to this video coming out later on this this week, so stay tuned for more about the Rabbath technique.
I neglected to mention in [...]