Play UBass!

Hi,

Well, it’s kind of funny how things connect sometimes…

One of my students showed me one of Adam Neely’s videos about bass and learning. From out of the blue I’m in the video. Ok, it’s only a couple of seconds from Jammin’ with my Kala Ubass video no. 7 but still! This video features my friends and really great guitarists Frank Vignola and Vinny Raniolo.

So why is those seconds of out performance flashing by?

In this particular video Adam talks about playing music alone or together. He also speaks around the topic of learning to play music and if music theory is necessary.

When I started jammin’ with Frank and Vinny we had never played a single note together before that very moment I came up on that stage!

I was invited to jam. We decided to play Fly me to the moon and a C-jam blues in the intermission between the two sets they played. That’s it! No rehearsals, no talks about form (how the songs should be structured with the different parts and so on). We just played Music.

How was this possible? Well, we all shared some common ground. We have all been playing Music for quite some time and as it happens we all knew (some) standard jazz repertoire. But is that enough? It’s a big part of the equation but one more ingredients is super important…

Focused listening! Because we all not just played but also listened to what the other musicians was doing we could come up with an arrangement on the fly that worked pretty good in my opinion.

I really like the part in our jam where I somehow manage to imply a cut time feel and the jam turns into a slow blues for a while before Frank takes us back to the original tempo!

Back to Adam’s video. He talks about the, overwhelming information we can get from the Internet regarding music theory. But as Adam points out, information is not knowledge. The knowledge part is when the information becomes true to you and when you have processes the info!

This is a very interesting topic. In the Lesson Packs that will be released (in iBook format) the focus is to help ubassists to get info about specific things (music theory, styles/genres, techniques and so on…) but also to paint the ”big picture” of how it all connects – from information to knowledge!

Teasers of the first Lesson Pack – Basic techniques are being made and will be shared soon in a new newsletter! So subscribe here to get first hand info!

Happy ubass playing to you all!

/Magnus