Earlier this year I answered a question on Talkbass about playing fretless bass. It works pretty well as a stand alone essay so I’m reposting it here. Enjoy!

A few thoughts on fretless, that for the most part apply to all music making. 

Firstly, there’s no ‘cheating’ – do what you need to do to make the music be what it should be. In my experience as a teacher and player (across 30-odd years, teaching at everything from beginner to post-graduate level), the fretless players who use the lines to help are more in tune more of the time than the ones who play unlined basses. It’s a scatter-plot, and there are definitely players who have absolutely mastered their intonation on a blank fretless board, but certainly for me, I can get in tune and stay in tune way, way more consistently with fretlines. Such that I’d never even contemplate owning an unlined fretless unless it was a gift with significant sentimental value and I wasn’t planning on using it professionally.

Then, the advice about using some kind of reference is really good – can be a drone, an open string, a held chord on a piano, a massive reverb patch that lets you sustain a chord while playing over it, a freeze pedal, or a loop of you playing a fretted bass (please check the intonation of the fretted bass before looping it!  ) – unless you’re playing unaccompanied, pitch is always relative to whatever and whoever you’re playing along with. I once saw a video by a fairly well known bassist talking about the joy of fretless being the option to play it ‘more’ in tune than a fretted bass. The odd thing was that almost all of his work with with guitarists, who obviously played fretted guitars – the idea that you’d be sliding your thirds and sevenths into their true temperament positions against a guitar is just a recipe for not being in tune with what the rest of the band are up to… ‘In tune’ is a constantly moving target, and your ability to listen and respond is vital. This is also a place where lines can be hugely useful in spotting where a particular note is consistently slightly sharp or flat, and you can then play just slightly behind or ahead of the line.

Being able to listen to a note and correct it isn’t the same as being in tune from the get-go. Intonation that’s purely by ear is a recipe for playing the front end of every note slightly out. That can be an interesting effect, but if that’s not what you’re looking for, it’s worth focussing on what physical reference points help you get your finger in the right position before playing the note. Your ear can’t do that. Muscle memory can, and that can be greatly aided by fretlines. Again, not a hard and fast rule, the side dots can sometimes be enough, but I can’t ever imagine being focused enough on the aesthetics of a bass that I would make it harder to play.

The advice about developing technique in response to musical need is a good priority structure. That’s not to say that technique-led practice can’t also yield inspiration, but turning any technical exercise into a music-creation exercise as soon as possible is the best way to move from asking ‘is this right?’ (a question almost no audience member is ever concerned with) to ‘is this good?’ (the aesthetic portion of how we assess what we’re up to). That distinction is also at the root of our ability to take some agency over our creative path, and start making decisions about what we want to hear and like to hear vs what we perceive to be ‘correct’ in the eyes of some orthodoxy or other. Again, that’s not to say that correct technique is unimportant, just that it is a stepping stone towards our actual creative goals, which is making good music, making meaning, expressing ourselves and/or doing justice to the music we’re re-creating. Our technical development is likely to be most satisfying when it is at the service of a mode of music making that brings us joy, satisfaction and meaning.

Finding a teacher – fretless is a different animal, and requires a bunch of observational, process-led and quasi-philosophical perspectives to explore what it offers and how it is learned in a manner distinct from the fretted bass. That doesn’t mean that people who don’t play fretless primarily can’t be good at teaching it, just that their take on it needs to be pretty well considered – my favourite piece of fretless advice ever came from an Anthony Jackson masterclass I was fortunate to attend, when he was asked about tips for playing fretless, and he answered ‘I don’t play fretless, but if you want to play fretless well, you need to be offended by your own bad intonation.’ – in that response was a stark and deep understanding of the relationship between artist perception and audience experience, and the task of giving the listener (or whatever is hiring you!) the best possible performance, and the enhanced role of intonation in those considerations for a fretless bassist over a fretted one.

I do teach online, so if that’s useful, message me. Otherwise, just ask around and see what people come back with. I would hope that any prospective teacher would listen to your intentions before prescribing a method to help you get to where you want to be.

The journey post-remission for a cancer survivor is a really odd one. Firstly, it can take a long, long time to realise just how big the impact on your mental health might be. In my case, about a year after remission, I started to see the cracks, and realise that I had some shit I needed to think about, talk about, and deal with.

And one of the weirdest branches of that mental journey is the one that deals with what happens when you become normal again. When your trauma and pain and potentially truncated existence stop being a topic that everyone wants to talk about, respond to and offer not just kindness but attention to. How does it feel to return to just being you and doing what you do?

As an artist, this takes on a few different layers of impact and meaning. I spent a lot of time during my cancer treatment and the immediate aftermath using music to reflect on what was going on in my world. For a good 18 months, almost everything I released was in some way a reflection on this new view of mortality gifted to me by a diagnosis that at one point told me I might not make it to Christmas 2022. And that music had power, and weight. I promoted very little of it beyond the Bandcamp subscription, but because the locus of the discussion around my health was the subscription, people who cared signed up. They did so for myriad reasons. Many because they wanted to financially support me at a time when work options were limited by chemotherapy and recovery. Some because they also wanted to read the updates and hear the music that was being created. And a much smaller number because the seriousness of my situation had prompted them to investigate my music, or been the catalyst for them becoming aware of me in the first place, and finding a treasure trove of music that they then got to dig into.

So it stands to reason that once the modus operandi had returned to making music about literally anything other than my own mortality, those whose primary motivation was a response to my ill-health took their leave. They maintained ownership of the music, so may also have felt that north of 100 albums by any one artist was enough to be going on with, and the unfolding journey that for me is the main rationale for the existence of the subscription was of less interest.

Which places me in a bit of a conundrum. Having my brand identity transform into ‘that guy who plays ambient music about cancer’ was not a role I wanted to box myself into. It was an incredibly powerful experience to make that music, and a privilege to get to share it with a community who were listening and caring and in no small way making my life financially viable, but making it the only thing that I do would have felt deeply inauthentic. Authenticity is a very difficult commodity to quantify – as I once commented in relation to a conversation about Justin Beiber’s social media support for someone else reaching Christmas Number 1 ahead of him, ‘authenticity is a luxury of the unknown’. Everything that artists do is gestural, semiotic, loaded with multiple meanings, encoded with messages to be decoded by intended audiences and misunderstood by those stumbling on it as Internet flotsam and jetsam. There is good and bad faith, but assuming that everyone can tell the difference is a fools errand.

So I find myself ignoring numbers, interpreting the waxing and waning interest in my work from that wider community of cancer-watching well-wishers in line with my sympathies for their emotional journeys rather than my artistic one. To be making the best music of my life is its own form of reward. The occasional comment from one of the subscription core audience – which has, significantly, come to rest as a larger community than it was pre-cancer, but nowhere near its chemo-peak – pointing out their perception of the work as groundbreaking in a wider context but also autointertexually significant as new additions to this vast catalogue of 25 years of music making, helps me see it in that context.

It reminds me that success is never in a 1:1 relationship with artistic merit, or ones development as an artist, or certainly not the cumulative value of the body of work. Because that’s an incredibly hard thing to communicate in a world where the ‘average watch time’ of a video on Instagram rarely reaches 10 seconds, so telling long form stories about the value of several days worth of music is always going to be for an extremely select audience and the journey from peripheral knowledge of my work to subscriber-contributor is one that often requires multiple levels of exposure to music, to performance video, to narrative context, to music gear exposition, to political framing, to art activist performativity and finally to ‘wow, that’s a very small amount of money for that vast quantity of really rather special music!’

But that social media story telling process is where it is most perilous to be normal, unless being normal is your superpower. For years, my journey was the journey. I expounded on the mundane nature of my practice, I uncloaked all of the equipment and technique and process, making as much of it sharable and usable by others as possible. I set about fulfilling my mission statement of working out ‘how to make music that really matters without pretending that I’m special’. That’s a tough thing to maintain after a tricky cancer diagnosis and the skill of documenting that journey presents you and your words and the music that soundtracks them as anything other than normal. You momentarily become an avatar of hope for the vast number of people who are encountering cancer in their own lives or those of their loved ones daily. You become a beacon, the poet laureate of lymphoma. Writing about my experiences of the illness, of care in the NHS, of recovery, of mortality, was extremely – immeasurably – important for me. I made sure to focus on writing what I needed to write, not what people needed to hear. I knew – and publicly acknowledged – that parts of what I wrote would be really, really difficult reading for those whose cancer journeys were nowhere near so hopeful, for those who following a diagnosis as complex as mine or more, wouldn’t get the ‘best case scenario’ response, but instead found their tumours to be stubborn and unresponsive to treatment. I’ve watched a number of friends die since I went into remission. Friends I was able to help and comfort to varying degrees, but for some my recovery as presented on social media was actually more painful than helpful. So those conversations took a very different direction to the Facebook-as-therapy journey of my own documentation.

But the specialness was inevitable. I’m consistently a fairly good writer and on occasion a great one. And I’ve got two decades of experience at channeling my view of the world into music that soundtracks it. So carrying on doing that wasn’t a business move, it wasn’t a flex, it was just how I’d dealt with everything from the death of my uncle in 2000 onwards. Music that just tried to make sense of it all.

So I have to let go of the big significance of cancer. It’s a media scale story attached to a human scale practice. A Facebook post with 900 comments has an asymmetry that stifles any conversational substance, but the much smaller and more focused conversations that periodically unfold with my subscribers are richer, less public Q&A and more ongoing dialogue with a group of people who demonstrate enduring care not just for my health and ongoing viability as a human, but also, crucially, for the music. Because the music is the social object. It is the music, not cancer, that exists at the heart of the enduring Space of the Talkaboutable, the place where the soundtrack catalyses a conversation. And it is into that conversation that my music is released. Some of it engenders little or no conversation or commentary. Sometimes it seems that’s because it’s impact is personal, and sometimes because it’s impact is negligible. But the freedom to write and record and not apologise or proselytise is a luxury very, very few artists with financially sustainable practices can attest to. And for that I feel immense gratitude.

If you’ve got this far and want to join in with the very normal conversation about some really lovely music, please head over to my Bandcamp subscription to find out more. 

There are very few musicians whose future, unannounced, unheralded work fills me with excitement. I don’t sit wondering what my favourite bands’ next album will be like. I wait patiently for them to do whatever they need to do, take as long as they like, and I get excited when it’s out and I get to hear it.

Except D’Angelo. Despite being someone who releases 10 albums a year, I can still see the immense value in taking your time. I’m not sure how much of D’Angelo’s delay in finishing work was the chaos of his life and how much was creative process, but either way, Black Messiah is without any doubt the longest I’ve ever waited for a record that felt worth it. Worth the wait. And in between, I spend hours, days, weeks even pondering what D’Angelo might do next. What his album would sound like, how it would change me.

Because he had previous form of doing just that. Changing me. When I first heard Voodoo, soon after it came out, after Julian Brown – then a student of mine, now the drummer in Massive Attack – hipped me to it. It was dizzying, alien, strange, beguiling, truly beautiful, majestic, unreachable… So many things going on that left me quite literally open mouthed. I said in my initial post on D’Angelo’s death that there is Steve before Voodoo and Steve after Voodoo. It quite dramatically changed how I thought about the process of making music, but even more so what ‘rhythm’ and groove actually are.

These days I talk endlessly about the idea that groove is a composite of what everyone brings to the music. It’s not an external grid that everything is either on, ahead of or behind (though we still feel music as ahead and behind the beat, for sure), it’s the sum total of what everyone is doing. So hearing Questlove’s drumming with Pino, D’Angelo, Raphael Saadiq and Charlie Hunter’s bass playing changed how I thought about that relationship. They didn’t need to be ‘locked in’ in the old sense of hitting exactly the same beat at the same time. They could be in dialog, a dance, could invoke questions and mystery. Such delicious, funky, sexy mystery…

He wasn’t the first person to ever do that – it was a feature of a lot of early reggae – particularly the Barrett Brothers in The Wailers – and some of Miles Davis’ 70s work, but D’Angelo put it front and centre. J Dilla was a massive, massive part of the story, the picture, the transformation. A mentor to so many who were thinking about how sampling and samplers changed how we understood what music was. But D’Angelo took that vision and applied it to a band, to live playing. Hearing Slum Village’s Fantastic Vol 2 (Also introduced by Jules) was a wake-up call to new ways of thinking about music production. But it was sample based hip hop. It shook me and I loved it as a completely new thing, but I couldn’t and didn’t see how it impacted what I was doing.

But D’Angelo offered something that made sense to me. The harmonies, the jazz chording, the relationship between a bassist and a drummer. ‘Dilla Time’ in a reachable context… It’s something that’s been essential to how I approach loop-based music from pretty much the start – Voodoo came out the same year as my first album. Complexity, ‘imperfection’, and groove-as-composite became absolutely essential parts of my creative process. Looping a part multiple times to allow there to be variation, or using shorter loops for a more hypnotic, incessant vibe. All shaped by hip hop and RnB through the D’Angelo lens.

D’Angelo became a touch stone for musical ears – oh you dig D’Angelo? Cool, we’re going to get on. I brought it up in interviews with bassists, to find out what they thought of it. I used it as a measure of possible collaborators, whether they were fans, whether they understood what it meant. Voodoo, knowledge of Voodoo, love for it, was a currency. Like Songs In The Key Of Life, On The Corner, Hejira. People who dug them, fully, were different. They were like us. Initiated.

When in 2015 I added electronic percussion to my set-up, it was the lineage of Dilla, D’Angelo and their descendants that shaped every aesthetic component. It being looped electronic sounds put Dilla in the foreground, but that feel connected with me in the first place because of Voodoo. That was what shifted the ground, rebuilt the walls, extended the horizon…

He was about 14 months younger than me. We had a couple of people in common. Forever one step removed. I can’t really imagine a situation in which we would have met, though I’d thought long and hard about which tracks of mine I’d want him to hear. And then I find out that he was taken by Cancer. Pancreatic cancer, so not the same type as me, but cancer-people have an affinity. It’s not a small group – 1 in 2 of us will have a cancer diagnosis of some sort at some time – but we feel it. And survivor’s guilt is ever present. Especially when it’s the one person in the world whose future music, undeclared, perhaps even unrecorded, brought delight, anticipation and excitement to my world. I was sad when Prince died, imagining when he might have done in the future. But I didn’t spend much of my life before his death pondering what he might do next. I just waited for him to do it. D’Angelo stood alone, inspiring me by just existing in music, by imagining what this next 10 year wait would result in.

RIP, you incredible, mind-blowing, troubled genius. You changed music. Like Miles and Bowie and Prince, like Ellington and Joni Mitchell, like Nina Simone and John Coltrane, Michael Hedges and Jaco Pastorius. Like Dilla and Fela. You changed music.

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.