There’s a scene at the end of the film Walk Hard, where Dewey Cox plays his last ever show. It’s a weirdly moving scene, though still ridiculous in keeping with the rest of the film. In the wings are the spirits of many of the people who had died during the life story we’ve just witnessed in the rest of the film. Significant figures from his journey there to cheer him at this momentous moment.

I’ve finally got my PhD. Done and dusted. Come in, Dr Steve.  I passed my viva in January, but it was with ‘substantive corrections’. At first I was irritated at the requests, concerned that the required additional sections would upset the symmetry of the whole thing. But by giving it time and committing to the vision for it that my examiners saw, I’ve ended up with a much stronger thesis.

PhDs are always, always a big f’ing deal. The normal time frame is 3 years full time or 5 years part time. Mine was extended dramatically beyond that, first by a suspension during COVID, and then again for cancer and recovery. So from enrolment to graduation is just shy of ten years. TEN YEARS. I was 42 when I started this. Flapjack was 5. It was pre-Brexit, pre-COVID, pre-cancer, pre-divorce. So much in my life has changed in those ten years, and now this chapter is finally closed. An invitation to look forwards.

I’m deeply, deeply proud of the work. It feels like a really significant document of a 25 year journey to build a very unusual form of community around my music, one that as the thesis shows, was kind of there in spirit from the start.

But in writing it, and in thinking about it now, I’m deeply, immeasurably indebted to so many people for their impact on the work. My supervisors, Dr Paul Thompson and Dr Bob Davis, were brilliant. Infuriating and annoying at times, of course, as they should be, but they guided me towards this, and it wouldn’t be what it is without them. And then I had the people who would advise me as I went along. Dr Jon Greenaway, AKA The LitCritGuy read through my ‘confirmation of registration’ at the end of my first year, and really, really helped me get that together. Dr Annette Markham spent hours and hours with me on Zoom helping me make sense of method, expanding my vision for how to be rigorous about documenting a community and its interactions, but also just being super interested in and excited about what I was up to at a point where I was sometimes unsure of even what it was. What an absurd luxury to have such extraordinary people helping me out. Reading their books and work online was inspiring enough, but the support as friends and advisors was priceless.

And then we arrive at the Walk Hard film clip. Because others who shaped the work in vital, transformative ways, who encouraged, advised, supported and cajoled me, are no longer with us.

First to help shape the PhD was Dr Phil Tagg. We met at a mini-conference at Leeds Beckett before I started the PhD, at which he said my questions to him after he’d presented were ‘the hardest I’ve been grilled since my viva’. Phil was a mercurial and unique scholar, a long-winded, cantankerous, meandering writer who through that process uncovered some extraordinary insights about music and semiotics. When I went to Leeds to discuss the topic of my PhD I had an hour with Phil and he told me how boring every idea I had was until I started talking about the audience. Then he got excited. His lack of bullshit meant that he waited until something seemed worthwhile to affirm it. I desperately needed that and was looking forward to him being my antagonist during my studies. But it was the last time I saw him. He dissappeared off to Canada and died last year…

The first to leave was Neale Bairstow. Neale’s contribution to the work could’ve been its own PhD – from his hospital bed in France, Neale, who I never met, wrote eight pages about how he understood what was going on between me, my music and my audience. He understood what this PhD was about WAY WAY before I did. I didn’t prompt him, we didn’t discuss it beforehand, he just wrote it and got it. And holy shit did he get it. And then he died. Before I could tell him just how heavily his work impacted my work. I only really incorporated it into the PhD in the last year of writing it. Such was the depth and breadth of his insight that it took me that long to see that what I was trying to understand was what he’d explained back then.

And then there was Dr John Hinks, who I knew first and fullest as a student of mine. Teaching John bass was one of the great joys of my teaching life. He was full of adventure, enthusiasm and curiosity, and with a little encouragement became a prolific improviser, working with groups in his home town of Leicester and also here in Birmingham. His great contribution to the PhD was encapsulated in one conversation, recounted in the work. After an improvised gig at Tower Of Song, featuring a duo of me and trumpet genius Bryan Corbett, I asked John what he thought of it, and he said ‘I don’t know, I’ll tell you when I’ve heard it again’. It was a proper thunderbolt moment for me, realising what the subscription offers to people at gigs, in the knowledge that what they’ve just witnessed being created before their eyes and ears will come back to them as a recording. John died almost exactly a year ago, unexpectedly. He leaves a huge hole, and I’ll forever miss his friendship.

My other Zoom advisor during COVID was Dr Jonathan Sterne. We’d met online in the late 90s, on a bass player mailing list that’s written about in my Thesis. Reconnecting years later in Oxford, we became online friends, and our Zoom chats were alternately PhD support and bass lesson. We skill swapped and talked endlessly. When Jonathan died at the start of the year, I copied our Facebook chat into a text document and it was as long as my Thesis. His advice, his kindness and patience with my often not having any real clue what I was doing, was otherworldly. Jonathan is a scholar who defined the field of Sound Studies, a scholar of monumental significance, and here he was helping me make sense of my ramblings and telling me over and over again how important the work was, messaging me every time he would quote me in a lecture (mostly my extensive rants about how dreadful Spotify is!)

And finally Dr Emily Baker-Abis. Without doubt one of the greatest singer/songwriters I’ve ever encountered, Emily was also a razor sharp academic, a theorist and observer who made sense of so many things. Our PhD study periods overlapped, so we would occasionally motivate one another with swapping bits of writing, 500 words at a time. She was encouraging and critical and insightful and brilliant in equal measure, never letting me get away with stuff that could be written better. She’d ask questions that sometimes were hugely encouraging because I’d already answered them further on in the section than the 500 words I’d sent her. And if I was thinking like Emily, that was a good thing, right? When she was diagnosed with cancer at the start of the year, we chatted about it, and made plans for more collaborative writing and work together. We won’t get to do it.

So now, at the end of the Beautiful Ride of this PhD, I’m looking to my left and right, and there they are, Jonathan, Emily, John, Neale and Phil. The great cloud of witnesses, cheering me on. They are woven deep into the work, and collectively, I’m pretty sure I may not have even finished it without them.

And I’m now Dr Steve. Ten years. Holy shit. It’s finally done. Let’s see what’s next.

Weird thing I just remembered. I once did a voice-over job for Microsoft – about 20 years ago. I can’t remember what the product was, but I remember that the opening line of the script was “Why do we teach? To change the world one student at a time”, and despite that being cheesy MS marketing copy, it still holds true.

It’d be hard to argue that there’s ever been a better time to learn an instrument. Just as with music and TV and art and games, the world is awash with extraordinary educational materials with a degree of accessibility that was utterly inconceivable when I was at college in the early 90s. Back when poorly presented instructional VHS tapes cost as much as a week’s rent and books came with a flexi-disc of examples.

Several times a month I get asked why I don’t have an online course available, why when I’ve taught online for over 15 years I still haven’t done my own downloadable offering. In these days of every creative trying to figure out ‘how to get paid while you sleep’ it’s the obvious thing to do.

But the reason is simple – I’m a REALLY good one on one music teacher, and that offers something that no course or video lesson can give: instant feedback. I mean, I DO teach online, on Zoom, all of my bass teaching is remote – which means I can teach students from all over the world (still no students from Antarctica, but have taught people from every other continent 😉 ). I also do a monthly live session for Musical-U that offers an amazing space to consider how to maximise the value of a group session like that for the attendees. And my private students all get a video of every lesson to download, so they can rewatch it as many times as they want.

Private music lessons are about more than information. They’re a form of mentorship, a way to help guide not only someone’s technical development but their journey into music making. And in that setting, it can be far more precisely student-led. Instead of the self-study path through pre-recorded material being one of foraging through everyone’s free taster lessons on YouTube, it becomes about the teacher’s expertise and experience being applied to guiding the student through the knowledge, technical and listening skills and psychology of playing their preferred style of music in their preferred setting.

The standardisation of material and method in music teaching is a trend that favours teachers not students. If you can write one course and sell it to everyone, that’s an efficient business model, right? Yup, but it’s not ideal for the student whose interests only partially intersect with the assumptions at the heart of the pre-recorded material.

This is not at all an anti-online course essay – I have recorded multiple courses for ScottsBassLessons and use a lot of other people’s pre-recorded tuitional material in my own learning, just as I absolutely rinsed Alexis Sklarevski’s “The Slap Bass Program” in the early 90s.

But falling in line with an economic trend would undermine that which I do best, which is helping to guide the learning journey of curious music makers across the spectrum of styles and intentions. From gigging/recording solo artists to people content to play along with their favourite records and develop a deeper understanding of what’s going on in that music that has soundtracked their entire lives. There’s no imposed hierarchy of assumed creative paths. Everyone’s creative desires are met with respect and a unique combination of learning materials to guide them. And in a lot of cases, those lessons are complimenting additional learning elsewhere. As it should be.

If that sounds interesting to you, drop me a line and we can see if there’s space in our schedules to make lessons happen. See my teaching page for all the details.

A couple of months back I got to play on a truly beautiful track by singer/songwriter Leah Wilcox. The song’s called Just A Bore, and you can hear it/buy it on Bandcamp:

Was thinking today about other fretless things I’ve played on, and was reminded of some of the tracks I’ve done with Artemis – she and I have worked together numerous times, including multiple tours with Daniel Berkman, but I also played bass on some of her solo tracks. Here are three:

And while we’re here, I should add the tracks I’ve recently done with singer/songwriter Martyn Joseph. It was an absolute thrill to play with someone I’ve been listening to for literally 40 years!

(for those catching up, legendary punk producer Steve Albini died suddenly last week. One of the stories that’s been recirculating is a tweet thread he posted about how much he hates Steely Dan).

Here’s the thing. It matters not one bit whether you agree with Albini or not about Steely Dan. All artists need to have strongly held opinions about art. Sharing them is generally a bad idea. I imagine that for Steve his right to share his unfiltered thoughts on his Twitter feed comes from a commitment of radical autonomy – he didn’t say it (as far as I’m aware) in an interview, just a thread on his own Twitter feed. Read it if you like, respond if you like, argue if you like. He didn’t seem to be one to try and control how people responded to his thoughts ever.

Anyway, the thing about you having those big opinions is that they are absolutely vital to you understanding what you want to do and how you want to do it, and are of zero relevance to anyone else. Because the value of them is in you being able to refine your own work in response to things in other people’s work that don’t reflect what you want from art. They will show up in your work in obvious ways. No-one ever listened to In Utero and thought ‘wow, there’s a lot of Gaucho in here’.

I have LOADS of these. There are a ton of sacred cow bands that I have zero interest in, there are things that a large majority of bassists do that I have absolutely no time for. There are creative choices that some people make that leave me scratching my head. But I very rarely tell anyone, for three main reasons:

1) there’s no way that my opinion should impact the work of anyone who isn’t paying me to impact their work with my opinions. If someone values what I do and how I work, and wants me to contribute to their work, then it’s only right and proper that I comment on their work – that’s what I do as a teacher, producer, arranger and friend. But for me to take something that someone has put into the world and then to declare it good or bad, successful or a failure isn’t something they need in their lives. My own place of peace comes from knowing I’m not their target market. This isn’t FOR me, that’s why I don’t like it. If I haven’t spent the time to find out WHY they did a thing, bitching publicly about it’s impact on me helps no-one.

2) I have students whose taste would be greatly impacted by my bold declarations of what I do and don’t like. I don’t want to shit on their favourite bands, because it won’t help them to learn to judge things in a meaningful way for their own art. (There are definitely exceptions to this, where I’ve dissed a massive band or two for comic relief – but even then, I’ve ended up with people who were sod-all to do with the conversation getting all bent out of shape because I shat on a band they like… Yup, I should have kept quiet. My bad). If someone I respected came along and told 18 year old me that the bands I liked were shit, whether or not I later decided they were, it wouldn’t helped me refine my taste and my musical vision, I would have just felt shame. And no-one should ever feel shamed for their music taste. Ever.

3) Just because I wouldn’t do something doesn’t mean someone else shouldn’t. Those bass-things that loads of people do are never things I’d tell anyone else not to do. Some of them are things I’m happy to teach students about. But they aren’t me and don’t have my goals, and those techniques and ideas are clearly serving their vision. Me not liking them is a really useful thing for me to spend time with, and I’m SOOOO grateful that I never spent a bunch of time learning the same shit as loads of other players only to find that I didn’t like it anyway. But that usefulness to me is not the same as usefulness to anyone else. So I refine my own vision and find clarity in what appears to be lacking in other people’s work.

Albini hates Steely Dan for a bunch of reasons that are screamingly obvious if you’ve ever heard literally anything he made. It’s absolutely fine to love Surfer Rosa and Aja – there’s nothing radically broadminded about being into music from different genres. Agreeing or disagreeing with Steve Albini about polished 70s jazz-rock isn’t a useful public statement or opinion, but it may be REALLY helpful to you to understand what you love and what you need to do to incorporate those things into your own playing. I’m indebted to Chuck Rainey and to Kim Deal, to Steve Albini and Donald Fagen. One of the hugely celebrated bands that I’m most ambivalent about are a MASSIVE influence on so many of my favourite artists. I’m not wrong and neither are they. It’s just how we find out what matters to us and how to pursue it.

Listen, Judge, Strategise, but maybe keep it to yourself 😉❤

This is a post I put on Facebook (with a couple of clarifications) – crossposted here cos I want to write more about the subject in the next few days and needed continuity…

 

Bass kids, seen this meme? It’s bullshit. Pure nonsense. Here’s why.

The role of the bass player in YOUR band is entirely a matter for your band. Literally no-one else. If you choose to hand those decisions over to someone else (producer or manager, for example)that’s your choice, and I hope the economics and creative gains from doing that work out for you, but there is no ‘the role’ here. There are styles in which you are expected to play a certain way. That’s not ‘a band’. It’s a style and it’s an expectation that can be broken to create interest. There are contexts in which there are fairly safe assumptions that can be made about what is and isn’t appropriate to the context. That’s not ‘a band’. It’s a context and what’s great in that context is almost always up for negotiation.

This idea that bassists doing anything other than providing ‘the foundation’ or whatever is somehow transgressive, somehow undermining of our ‘role’ is all made up. It’s an invention of people who feel the need to gatekeep the instrument in a way that no other instrument comes close to. Sure drummers get a hard time for soloing and guitarists get stick for soloing for too long, but nothing compares to the weight of expectation dumped on bassists from those who supposedly have more experience and are trying to impart useful knowledge.

Here’s some useful knowledge. Play music that you love listening to. Not music you love playing, music you love listening to. [by this I don’t mean ‘just play covers’, I mean make music that appeals to your ears not just your hands. Music that sounds great to you, whether or not it feels fun to play] If your enjoyment comes from making great music, you’ll find yourself automatically playing in a way that pursues that. You’ll find yourself drawn to practice ideas and gear talk and contexts in which ‘making great music’ is the aim. If you’re drawn to play things that are fun to play over all over criteria, there’s a strong chance you’ll end up at odds with what the rest of the musicians you’re working with want to do. And you’ll struggle to find your tribe, because you’ll be hoping for a context in which your needs are met without considering anyone elses, and without the shared goal of making something amazing.

It’s why I never go to jam sessions – no shade on people who enjoy them [seriously, I’m not anti-jam sessions at all, they just aren’t what I look for from music], but it’s never been a context in which I’ve found a shared desire to make something amazing. It’s more about the fun of playing. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s also not a parallel goal to making amazing music. They can definitely intersect – I really, really enjoy playing solo or playing improvised collaborative gigs but my aim is always to make meaning, not just have fun wiggling my fingers.

Do what you want to do in your band to make the best music you can, and don’t let anyone who isn’t either giving you money for your skill, or being paid by you for their expertise, tell you what is and isn’t ‘the job’ of any musician in the band.

Almost every great movement in music happened because someone started fucking with ‘the rules’ in order to make great music. A ton of other people then made great music in that new space. You can carve out space or you can inhabit space, there’s no shame in just doing a thing that’s been done before and doing it really, really well. Just do it because you want to do it.

Play intentionally, deliberately, and make the best music you can. You, your audience and the world you inhabit deserve it.

I first taught one-on-one lessons online in the late 2000s. Skype wasn’t really up to the task, but a handful of people were interested in getting some lessons for whom me being thousands of miles away made in person lessons impossible.

[jump straight to bass lesson info]

I still did mainly in person lessons through most of the 2010s, gaining more online students as the decade went on.

Heading into the COVID lockdown and everything moved online. I wrote tutorials for other teachers and performers in how to set up for streaming lessons and gigs, and got on with moving all my bass teaching online.

Recently a few people in the UK have asked about in person lessons, and were surprised when I said I only teach online these days. So I thought I’d better explain why.

The main reason is that my entire approach to teaching has adapted to suit being video’d, so that every lesson is viewable by the student as many times as they want after. It’s odd given how many video’d lessons by tuition sites actually end up following many of the conventions of in person masterclasses, but what video allows me to do is demonstrate an idea enough so that the student can rewatch the demo, rather than playing it enough to be able to remember it clearly until the next time they pick up a bass. This allows me to fit many, many times more material into a single lesson. Which in turn allows students to pick and choose what to work on.

I am adamant that it is not my job to decide the exact path every student should go on. My students are almost exclusively grown-ass adults with a lifetime’s experience as music listeners, and generally some familiarity with the instrument (I love teaching total beginners, but it doesn’t happen very often). My task is to equip them to play the music that inspires and motivates them, to plot a journey towards their own creative aspirations and intentions. For some of them that’s playing bass in a band in a particular genre. For others it’s about broadening their general skill set regarding navigating the fretboard in terms of keys and melodic/intervallic patterns. For some it’s developing a practice towards building a vocabulary for improvisation, and still others it’s playing solo. I don’t decide what they should want to do, I just give them the tools to get there. And in any given week, I give them WAY more tools than they need, because I can, and because while rewatching the video there might be one section that really connects with them that they can watch over and over again and really dig into. They also have a document of their own playing that can be really useful for reflective and reflexive assessment of where they are up to.

Every lesson begins with me asking ‘what have you been playing this week?’ The answer to that doesn’t have to be related to the previous week, but more often than not it’ll be the development of something we were looking at in that lesson. Video really helps people diagnose their own weaknesses and areas for development, so I find students are way, way better at going ‘ah, I was really struggling with that aspect, so I spent a week on that’ – and ‘that aspect’ might not have actually been the topic of the previous lesson, just some technical or theoretical hurdle that needed to be surmounted to get there.

I’m finding that students progress faster on Zoom. A LOT faster. Their practice through the week is way more focused with the recall the video allows, and their path is way more refined towards their evolving creative goals.

So if that sounds good, drop me a line and we’ll get something booked in. All the deets are Here on the teaching page.

I’ve been teaching online now for about 15 years. I started out with Skype and have used all kinds of other video conferencing tools in between. The standard now, post-pandemic, is Zoom. (click here to book a lesson)

The problem with Zoom is also it’s great strength for conversation – it’s very good at filtering out sounds that are not human voices. For bass players having lessons online, this is a big problem.

Fortunately, they also include some options for getting better fidelity with an instrument. So here are a few things that are worth sorting out if you want the best experience of having a bass lesson on Zoom.

• firstly, don’t try and use speakers. It is technically possible to have your amp behind you and use the built in mic while you listen on speakers, but Zoom’s echo and background noise cancellation will make the bass sound choppy if it can be heard at all. So your first requirement is to be on headphones.
• secondly, an external soundcard is a must. This allows you to attach a microphone for talking and plug your bass in directly and then balance them to each other. if you’re buying one just for this, the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 is a great place to start.
• thirdly, make sure the settings are right. Here’s a screen shot of the settings I have in the audio section of Zoom:

• notice I have my soundcard (K-mix) chosen for in and out, I’m not letting it automatically adjust my level, background noise removal is off, original sound for musicians and hi-fi mode plus stereo audio, are on. I’ve also turned off echo cancelation as it’s not needed if you’re on headphones.
• Make sure there is enough of your bass signal reaching zoom – try it out before your lesson with a friend and check that you’re getting close to the top but not peaking. If you have pedals and effects, put those before it.
• (added this a day late!) An external camera with a wider field of vision may be really helpful in getting your whole bass into the frame! I spent a long time teaching and filming with either the camera built into my Macbook or a Logitech one that was quite narrow, and it was always a compromise of either bass or face in the shot! I now have a Zoom Q2n 4K and it’s perfect for this. A super-niche hack that I use when I’m travelling is to use the mic on the Zoom as my vocal mic by running a cable from the headphone out to my K-Mix soundcard, so I can still have the direct signal from my bass but use the surprisingly high quality mics in the Zoom for talking.

If you follow these steps it should work well – make sure you have the latest version of Zoom installed, as older versions didn’t have all of these settings.

if you want to book bass lessons, see my teaching page by clicking here.

Today is the NINTH anniversary of the launch of my Bandcamp Subscription. It has become a lifeline, the mechanism by which I not only fund and release music, but the context in which I get to make the specific kind of music I make, and where I get to talk about it and hear what it means to the subscriber community.

Bandcamp’s subscription offering launched to the public about 8 years ago, but four artists got to trial it for a year before it went public to iron out kinks and see which features worked best. I’d already been talking to Ethan about it for a couple of years at that point – we would meet up every January while I was at NAMM and he’d ask me what worked best for me with Bandcamp and what I’d like to see – prior to the subscription offering, I imagine that most of the things that I wanted that ended up as features were things where my desire just confirmed what they were already working on, but I got to have input into the subscription idea at the ground level, and as such, as this point it’s about 80% of my perfect platform. That’s a pretty amazing percentage for a non-bespoke platform, especially one that has to meet the diverse needs of artists and labels from all over the planet.

So what’s the value of the subscription, for me and the listener? I’m acutely aware that thanks to this model, collectively the subscribers know more about what I’m up to than I do – the sheer volume of music there means that I can’t keep in mind what it all is and what I’ve done before. I’m often too busy just being me and doing me-stuff to step back from it and see what it might mean. I also have a singular take on the impact of things like adding in percussion samples and field recordings to the aesthetic, or a set of assumptions around how much music would be too much music. But across the community there are people who have specific connections with loads of the albums, who came into my orbit at a particular time and the first album they found means something special to them. They are music makers who have a particular take on the significance (or annoyance!) of aspects of what I do, and a significant number of them have been around for two decades and have a deep and enduring sense of how this life in music has evolved. There are people who devour every album and listen to it multiple times, who are deeply grateful that they aren’t expected to pay £8 for every album, even though a handful of them probably would. And there are people who love the music of a particular era in my music-life and listen mostly to that but subscribe to support me because it’s less than £3 a month and they just want to help me carry on doing what I do…

It is still, by far, the best way to access my music, to become a part of its meaning and purpose. Every album is more like an episode in a story or podcast than it is a ‘product’ to be marketed and promoted. The way its released means that the invitation is there to comment, review, discuss, question and delve into the meaning of the music and even to dig into why I made certain decisions that meant particular albums don’t work for you. Those conversations are often the most mindblowing – imagine getting to talk about the confusion that a particular album conjures with someone who has already happily paid for it to exist long before it was conceived. The difference between that and the ‘apologetics’ that one indulges in when releasing a public album that deviates from the expectations of a fanbase is night and day.

I’m grateful to every single person who has been part of that community, whether they subscribed for a year and then (quite understandably!) thought ‘that’s quite enough Steve Lawson music for one lifetime‘, or have been there since day one (shout out to JP Rangaswami, Phil Thomas and Mike K Smith for being the longest standing subscribers, still there from day one. ♥️)

If you want to join us, that would be amazing. If you want to rejoin, that would also be a truly beautiful thing. The link to subscribe will be in the comments. And I’ll do a Bandcamp Listening Party for the latest subscriber album on Friday. More news on that ASAP. 🙂

Later on, I’ll do a bit of a dive into the economics, but suffice to say, the subscription was what sustained me through Cancer, it regularly pays the rent, it has rescued me from tax bills I’d foolishly not accounted for, and it turns every break-even gig into a recording session of deep and enduring value.

Have I ever written anything here about my merch store? Probably not. My bad.

Anyway, here it is – t-shirts, mugs and caps, all printed on demand, available in a bunch of different colours. Give your wardrobe a refresh 😉