Jason Heath’s Double Bass Blog

You are browsing the archives of teaching.

This is our next installment of Lyric Opera of Chicago and Grant Park Symphony bassist Andy Anderson’s Virtual Lesson series. This episode gets more in-depth with the French bow hold, featuring many exercises and close-ups of Andy’s bow hand and arm in action. We get a lot of close-up shots of Andy’s [...]

I was flabbergasted today during a discussion in one of my teacher certification courses when the course instructor suggested…well, actually, the instructor flat out told this class of music education students that it was unwise and unrealistic to expect to be able to both perform and teach at a professional level. This instructor [...]

I have been a bit concerned by the throwaway usage of the term ‘bass viol’ recently mostly in regards to John Harbison’s Concerto for Bass Viol. I am actually pleased that by the use of the term, double bassists are recognizing the connection between the double bass and the viol (or viola da gamba) family. [...]

Readers could easily have missed double bassist Phillip Serna’s great post yesterday on double bass private studio teaching amidst the glut of posts we’ve put out this week.  In this post, Phillip details the steps he went through in establishing himself as a full-time double bass studio teacher in the Chicago suburbs.
If one is interested [...]

For the second part of the Double Bass Blog series Thoughts from the Trenches – Double Bass Private Studio Teaching, I would like to offer some thoughts on recruiting & building a studio. This is often a topic that never comes up in traditional music programs and ends up being vitally important as a means [...]

This is our next installment of Lyric Opera of Chicago and Grant Park Symphony bassist Andy Anderson’s Virtual Lesson series.  This episode covers holding the bow and concepts and exercises to aid in the development of a solid bow technique.  We get a lot of close-up shots of Andy’s bow hand and the various bow [...]

Bill Harrison (PlayJazzNow.com, Jazz Underneath) just released a new set of play along tracks for jazz standards. Visit his site to check them out, and remember that you can always get some free sample bass tracks here on the blog through this link.
Bill has also been putting out some great jazz bass lessons recently. [...]

This is a post by Bill Harrison - playjazznow.com
___________
I’m a musician. You know - a man with no marketable skills. Civilians sometimes ask me what I do for a living; musicians I run into often ask me what kind of stuff I’ve been doing lately. These questions always leave me tongue-tied. What on earth DO [...]

Stan Haskins (Glued to the String) pointed me to a thought-provoking post from Dr. Jim Horn’s Schools Matter blog titled “I Test, Therefore It Exists”:
If you thought that the orgy of tabulation that has infected our society had reached a climax already, hang on. It seems now that the only way the Congressional braintrust can [...]

Readers may have missed this post (the steady flow of new posts makes it hard to catch everything on the blog here) last week containing my musings on why so many bassists blog. Although there are players of every instrument who blog these days, I think it’s safe to say that an unusually high [...]