www.stevelawson.net

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Musical Equipment Used
- Modulus Graphite Basses (6 string fretted and fretless and 4 string fretted), A Rick Turner 5 String Renaissance ‘Amplicoustic’ fretless bass, Accugroove bass cabinets, the Looperlative LP1 for looping, Lexicon MPX-G2 for processing, an E-Bow+, Bass Centre Elites strings, East-UK preamps, Evidence Audio cables. And I carry my bass around in an […]

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Back when I was writing for Bassist magazine in the late 90s, I mainly used interviews as a chance to meet up with my musical heroes. The bass ones were easy to sort out, but on a couple of occasions I used the magazine connection to interview my guitar playing heroes as well, and did […]

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So much is being written about the egalitarian nature of online distribution, it would be easy to believe that all our worries as wannabe professional musicians are now over. We all know that we can get a myspace page and a facebook music page, a reverbnation widget and a last.fm page, just like the big […]

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So the last four days have been spent touring the south of England giving masterclasses at branches of the The Academy Of Music And Sound - a chain of music schools that stretches the length of the UK, but is focussed around the south west and midlands.
Once a year they do a masterclass week, where […]

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