If you’re an avid watcher of my various online streams - be it Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed - you’ll have noticed over that last few days I’ve been talking about, and link to, BeyondBassCamp.com.
It’s a series of monthly masterclasses, inspired by the ones I give in California every January - for the last 4 or [...]
Announcing ‘Beyond Bass Camp’.
April 28th, 2009 · 5 Comments
Tags: Uncategorized
More new music - Youtube video of a brand new tune.
April 12th, 2009 · 17 Comments
After the new tune I posted on Audioboo a few days ago, I’ve got the bug for uploading new tunes. Hopefully it’ll finally kick me into action to make some decisions about the kind of record (or whatever passes for a ‘record’ these days
) I want to make.
Tags: Gig stuff · Music News · Musing on Music · bass ideas · looping
House Concert Hosting: a Beginner’s Guide.
March 9th, 2009 · 13 Comments
I’ve blogged a lot of late about the whole house concert phenomenon, and Lo and I seem to have inspired a few people with our house concert tour to get out and do it themselves. On Sunday afternoon, Neil Alexander and his amazing jazz/prog/fusion/rock trio Nail played a web-cast house concert from upstate New York, watched by about 15-20 in the room, and across the course of the gig, over 100 online.
Tags: the future of music · tips for musicians
Rejoining Emusic’s subscription download service.
March 8th, 2009 · 2 Comments
I just started my subscription to Emusic again. Emusic is one of the biggest site for indie music download sales, and works on a subscription model, so you pay for a certain number of tracks a month. I get 50 tracks for £11.99, I think.
Tags: the future of music · tips for musicians · website recommendations
Real Life Touring. A Social Media-Fuelled Tale.
February 15th, 2009 · 21 Comments
So, we’ve been back in England a few weeks. I’ve even had time to do my busiest week of masterclasses ever! (more on that later, I promise)
For now, it’s time to round up some of the lessons and tips from our house-concert-based, social-media-driven jaunt to the US over christmas/january.
A few salient points to start with:
most [...]
Tags: Geek · Gig stuff · the future of music · tips for musicians
Pillow Mountain Records
February 3rd, 2009 · 1 Comment
Pillow Mountain Records is a label that only exists to release music involving me. It’s not that I don’t like other people’s music, it’s just that they’d do a better job of selling it than I would.
It only really exists in name, as a brand that sort of lets you in on what to expect, [...]
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Interview with me from Bass Guitar Magazine.
January 28th, 2009 · No Comments
I’ve been hoping this interview would surface online for a quite a while - Adrian asked a really smart set of questions and, crucially, came back with questions relating to them. Email interviews can be really dull if it’s just a questionnaire (unless it’s MEANT to be a ‘20 questions’ type deal…) - because there’s no conversational flow. So as a tip for those of you interviewing online, send 2 or three questions to start with at most, preferably unrelated ones, and then develop each one with questions that follow on…
Tags: Music News · bass ideas · journalism · tips for musicians
Update on my broken bass…
January 28th, 2009 · 5 Comments
So, as you know, the saga so far is that British Airways smashed up my bass on the way over here back in Mid-Dec. I emailed them and rang them and was told to ’send them the fragile tag and the bubble wrap receipt‘ - fragile tag was a generic piece of cardboard, and the request for bubble wrap receipt came off like a sick joke, if you’d seen the damage done…
Tags: Music News · Random Catchup
Blog posts coming soon, but first, some video…
January 25th, 2009 · 3 Comments
Well, our concert tour has come to an end. Will blog about the amazingness of the whole thing soon, but first, here’s a lil video that Geoff Hickman took at the inauguration party/house concert we had down in Newport Beach, with the lovely and amazing Kerry Getz, which also featured Jason Feddy, Matthew Von Doran, Seth Horan, Ed Sheets and a whole load of hugely talented Hawaiians:
Tags: Gig stuff · Music News
More House Concert Adventures.
January 15th, 2009 · 6 Comments
One of the magical things about house concerts is just how quickly they can be put together. Because there’s no ‘press’ involved, no promotional deadlines to hit, emails can be sent out to friends as soon as the gig is decided on, and an audience can be rustled up in about 2-3 weeks.
Tags: Gig stuff · Music News