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
2008 in review - Blog posts for musicians, Pt 1
December 31st, 2008 · 1 Comment
It’s been an amazing year for me - a proper round-up of the year will be coming soon. But I thought that first I’d pull together some of the things I’ve blogged about this year. So this is part 1 of a compilation of links to my blog posts for musicians this year -
Tags: Geek · site updates · the future of music · tips for musicians
Blog-silence…
November 11th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Apologies for the blog-silence - life has been v. busy of late, mainly with moving house (if you’re a student of mine and didn’t get the email, drop me a line and I’ll let you know the details!)
Anyway, one of the up-shots of moving is that we’ve had limited access to the internets, so blogging, [...]
Tags: Random Catchup · teaching news
Social Media Consultancy
October 17th, 2008 · 1 Comment
I have been blogging since before it was called blogging and using social media to interact with my audience since the pre-millenial days of Web 1.0. As a result, I’ve found myself, over the years, in a good place to help others connect the worlds of music and social media.
I lecture regularly in universities and [...]
Tags: Uncategorized
Taking Care of Business (new post on Creative-Choices.co.uk)
July 17th, 2008 · No Comments
I posted a new article up on the Creative Choices site. It’s a few lessons learned from last week’s tour… I’ll write more extensively about the tour here once we’ve debriefed it properly as a band, but the tour just provided the impetus for a post about the need to make creative ventures financially viable [...]
Tags: Musing on Music · Random Catchup
Quick catch up… normal blogging will be resumed shortly.
July 15th, 2008 · No Comments
Illness+tour+grandad’s funeral= not much blogging from Steve. Sorry ’bout that.
So the last 10 days have involved 3 days mostly in bed ill, 4 gigs, 2 days of rehearsing learning mad prog tunes with multiple time signatures (and in one case, an impossibly difficult line in 7/8 that I just had to ditch and make [...]
Tags: Random Catchup
Teaching Thoughts Pt 4 - Pleasing parents is bad for the student.
July 9th, 2008 · 15 Comments
One of the things I most like about teaching electric bass is that very few kids are ever told by their parents to play it. ‘You need to learn piano/violin/clarinet because I never had the chance’ is the bane of so many teacher’s lives and one of the main driving forces behind kids giving up [...]
Tags: Musing on Music · bass ideas · teaching news · tips for musicians
Teaching Ideas Pt 3 - Teaching is therapy
July 8th, 2008 · No Comments
I think it’s safe to say that for almost every person playing a musical instrument, there’s a part of it that is about exploring a part of their character and personality that they don’t get to exercise elsewhere. Whether that’s me as a solo bassist writing music that expresses all the stuff I struggle to [...]
Tags: Musing on Music · bass ideas · teaching news · tips for musicians
Teaching Ideas Pt 2 - There’s no syllabus for punk and reggae.
July 7th, 2008 · 10 Comments
In the last post, I mentioned that my main aim when teaching is to instill in my students a love of learning. A huge part of me having a right to teach them anything is me respecting the music they listen to. Nothing is a bigger turn off for a student that a dismissive teacher.
At [...]
Tags: Musing on Music · bass ideas · teaching news · tips for musicians
Teaching ideas part 1. There’s no electric bass in most orchestras.
July 4th, 2008 · 8 Comments
The state of contemporary music teaching in the UK is terrible. Actually, the state of music teaching across the board is pretty awful. But at least with the classical stuff, the method makes sense, even if so many of the teachers are failing to inspire the students (do a straw poll of the people you [...]
Tags: Musing on Music · bass ideas · teaching news · tips for musicians