The Sound of Ska

English: Ernest Ranglin performing at WOMAD, UK, 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is something so definitive about certain styles of music. You hear a walking bass line, where the bassist plays a changing melodic pattern while still playing evenly on every beat in 4/4 time and it might evoke Jazz, Jump Blues, or Rockabilly. The tempo, or speed that the song is played, could change quite a bit and it would still be recognizable in that style. But once you change one element it sounds like the Islands. If the guitarist, or pianist plays chords on the “Ands” of the beats in a 4/4 measure you get the characteristic sound of Ska. You have the bassist hitting every down beat and the guitarist hits every upbeat and you get this crazy, compelling, joyful, dance music.

Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin says that musicians created the word Ska “to talk about that skat! skat! skat! scratching’ guitar that goes behind.” He is talking about offbeats. Now, those of you who know me know that this is also the name of the band I have played in for decades but as they said in the movie Airplane “That’s not important now.”

An offbeat is another way to describe the upbeat, or “And”,  in a 4/4 measure. One story I mention in my book is that a Jamaican producer, Prince Buster asked his guitarist Jah Jerry, (who played with what is probably the most influential and oldest Ska band “The Skatalites”) to emphasize the “afterbeat”. This is a different term for the same part of the beat – the “And”. This constant pulse of chords on the offbeats changed everything.

Here is what the guitar rhythm looks like:

The count is:                    1      and      2      and     3      and     4       and

So where did Ska come from? During WWII American service men stationed in Jamaica brought big band Jazz/Swing to the Island. Radio music from New Orleans brought the sounds of New Orleans Second Line Jazz, early Rock and R&B into the air in Jamaica. This mixed with Mento, a type of Jamaican folk music and Ska was born.

Initially Ska was optimistic and enthusiastic, reflecting the positive feeling of new Jamaican self- government in 1962 but the mood darkened as the culture changed, the tempo slowed and Ska morphed into Rock Steady which later became Reggae.

Many people who know about Ska probably think of Second Wave Ska. This is a distinctive evolution of traditional or First Wave Ska in several ways.  As Jamaicans emigrated to the UK, Ska clubs appeared in the cities of Blackburn, Lancashire and Margate where they settled. Jamaican musicians began playing with English musicians and this gave this music the name of “Two Tone” Ska. Bands such as the English Beat, Bad Manners, and Madness toured the world in the 80’s. One big difference with this from traditional Ska was the “Four on the Floor” bass drum, where the drummer joins the bassist in emphasizing each quarter note beat. There is also a much younger and almost “Punk” quality in some of the Two Tone bands both in their age, playing, and maturity.  (For example, the lead singer of Bad Manners, Buster Bloodvessel, used to constantly scream at the crowd, invoking  them to yell “You Fat Bastard” at him and he would pour buckets of water back at them.) Less mean spirited than Punk with it’s razor blades and safety pin piercings but still quite lively with a slightly dangerous feeling.

Buster Bloodvessel in 2007 at the Dundee Doghouse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This sound crossed back across the globe again as bands such as The Police, who used a lot of Caribbean elements in their compositions, toured in the US. I would not say the Police were exactly a Ska band but the influence was there. Listen to “Roxanne”, their huge first single, with  that Skat Skat Skat guitar.

This is what keeps all of us, musicians and fans alike, alive and interested. The continuous inventing and re-inventing of the same basic chords, scales, notes, and rhythms. Ya just mix em up and ya get this new music……. So, what the heck do we want to call it ?  It’s brand new.  How about Ska? No. That’s been taken.

The Legba Beat and the Migration of Styles Across the Globe

It is no coincidence that we chose New Orleans Funk as the opening style of the Funk chapter in my book, The Bassist’s Bible. New Orleans Funk is not only a foundation in the larger style of Funk, historically, but we also used it to introduce the musical concept of syncopation. We also did this because my co-author, Mick Berry, is from New Orleans and he could see the influence so plainly. While playing with him for years I could hear this influence infuse so many of the styles that we played together, in the different bands we were in. Before playing with him I had no idea how deep this influence was, across so many styles, not just in the Funk, Jazz, and Early Rock roots that New Orleans was famous for, but also in so many other types of music around the world.

For example, the similarity of the “Legba Beat” (a particular style associated with New Orleans Funk) to the Afro-Cuban “Tumbao” (the bass line played in Salsa) is un-mistakable. That pulse, is partially due to playing the “And of Two“, and just seems to open up peoples’ heads and propel their bodies to movement. It also pops up everywhere.

To explain: if the music you are familiar with is, say, Rock and Roll, and you are counting (or feeling) a 4/4 measure that uses this “And of Two” in a musical phrase, this beat comes at such an odd place that it catches your notice, whether you are a musician or not. Don’t worry!  If you are not quite following this, I will explain further.

Here is what it looks like to play the And of Two. For those who don’t read music, it looks more intimidating than it is. Again, hang in for a minute. You may get this.

When you play music (or dance) you normally count (or feel) the beat as 1 2 3 4 (again in 4/4 time.) If you break that up so each beat gets two counts, it becomes 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Those “ands” are called the offbeats or upbeats and the numbers (1234) are the downbeats.

So let’s apply this to a musical example, in this case showing the And of Two.

The count is:                      one and    two      AND   three and   four and

The ALL CAPS “count” above corresponds to the “And of Two” and shows where you play it, just below the note on the example. The other symbols show rests where you do not play. I’m sure you can see the logic of where the name comes from. Awesome. You are getting this right? You will be a bassist in no time.

It may not seem like much but when you take this beat and put it into a rhythmic phrase, it really jumps. Let’s look at a comparison to see the difference. Here is a standard Back Beat, a common pattern in Rock, where the snare drum is played right on the 2 and the 4 of a 4/4 measure (which are the downbeats. You are catching on right?)  The Back Beat is probably pretty familiar to you. It goes like this:  

 The count here is:           one            TWO           three         FOUR

or showing the offbeats:  one   and    TWO   and  three  and  FOUR and

You have undoubtedly heard this millions of times. It sounds like Boom BAP Boom BAP. (I am not showing the bass drum notes (the”Boom”) to simplify the example.)

By comparison the Legba Beat looks like this:

  The count here is:       ONE    and    two     AND   three and FOUR and

Much different.

If you understood that, or even just got a feel for it, congratulations! I spent rehearsal after rehearsal with my Jazz Fusion band “Taxi” in the 70’s failing to be able to instinctively ‘feel’ this “And of Two” beat. I felt like such a dweeb. Though I was actually playing an Afro Cuban Tumbao and not a Legba Beat, both styles share this “And of Two” and I kept wanting to play right ON the TWO beat, the downbeat, (or move the ONE of the “count” to the And of Two.) In other words, I could play it but I could not feel it. It was so cool and so wrong (in such a good way) that It drove me crazy and exploded my head. Once it was explained to me (decades later) it seemed so easy.  Music theory does not have to be all that mysterious. Right?

I was going to show you a Tumbao example here, but I do not want any heads exploded at this point. Messy, messy. My blog would suffer and I am so sick of cleaning things. Bad Idea, so I will keep it simple (which is hard to do if you are me) and make a relatively short post out of it instead.

From hearing the Neville Brothers play “Fire on the Bayou” to the Grateful Dead playing “Not Fade Away”, all the way to Salsa and Afro-Cuban Jazz, you hear this influence that came from Africa through the Caribbean to New Orleans. If you keep studying, you also hear those same styles go back to their sources, mixing back in with the native cultures to create Reggae and Afrobeat, and Soukous and Rai, and countless other styles, which then, of course, come back to the U.S., yet again, and influence musicians here for another round of migration as the music continues to evolve.

You will find this, and lots of other related information in my book:  The Bassist’s Bible: How to Play Every Bass Style from Afro-Cuban to Zydeco. Even if you are not a bassist, you may find it interesting. Perhaps reading it might inspire you and make you a bassist.

Drunks On Stage

Thanks to Micaela Marsden for the sketch of my favorite ale. http://micaelamarsden.wordpress.com/

Back in my youth, heavy drinking wasn’t a big part of my scene, musically or personally. This was the 60’s. People did other things for fun. (We were on a “Spiritual Quest,” you know? If something you ingested messed up your body or spirit it was probably not OK.)

So, my experience with out-of-control audiences was altogether different from that of musicians who played bar gigs. That bar experience could be summed up as “jump on stage, grab the mic, sing horribly off key, and fall on the band’s equipment.” A formula that would become the standard for bar band experiences everywhere, and eventually defining an entire industry “Karaoke”.

Gigs I attended, as an audience member, were thought of as “Dance Concerts.” Dancing itself was considered rather risqué. The weirdness I dealt with consisted of spacey, sometimes creepy, eyes watching the musicians move across the stage, and people twirling, twirling, twirling, walking around naked or in costume, or just jerking their bodies around mindlessly–sometimes when the music wasn’t even playing. It wasn’t frightening, just a little more creative weirdness than I appreciated or thought of doing myself at the time.

Things weren’t always blissfully weird, of course. (Altamont in ’69 — the Rolling Stones free Bay Area Rock show and a possible subject of a future post) is a good example of bad craziness. That show made me realize that being on stage did not protect you from the craziness. Indeed, it seemed like the music itself guided the emotional response of the audience. The only way to keep you safe was to keep everybody safe and play positive music. Jah Love.

The first bar gig I played was in the 1970s with my first performing band, “Taxi”, which played Latin Jazz Rock Fusion. We loved Latin Rock, but we were all deep into Electric Jazz . We had an awesome Afro-Cuban  percussionist, Robert Rios (now an awesome bassist), as well as Charlie de la Casa on crazy jazz guitar, and Dennis Seacrest, our eclectic drummer.

We were very experimental, but our music was very structured. We played nothing but original material, and all of us were writing. We had synthesizers (a big deal then) and effects on bass and guitar, and even a sax and vocals on some of the paid gigs. (You remember us, right?)

We could play almost anywhere — art galleries, parks, private parties –because we had our own PA system. So, we did not have to deal much with bar gigs and drunks. Then we got a gig on a rooftop bar in the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, opening for a cover band one Friday night.

We played our set and watched the the audience — an after hours business crowd — loosen their ties, kick off their high heels, and drink cocktails in these huge fishbowl-like glasses. A few of them tried to dance to our compositions (in 7/8 or 13/8) and were wondering why their moves weren’t quite working. (Instead of dancing to a beat counted as 1-2-3-4, think of dancing while counting to 7 or 13.) After our set, the bar manager told us that the other band hadn’t shown up, and asked if we would play two more sets.

This was very cool except for 1) My pants.  The pair I had on were so old and tight that I split them completely up the back and I was hanging out big time back there. I honestly can’t remember if I was wearing underwear. I often didn’t.

And 2) The songs. We did not know a second or third set.

Details details. We went for it anyway (of course). Immediately. We were getting paid.

We had practiced a few funk tunes, so we just stretched them out and played endless grooves, improvising on vocals, while I stood strategically in front of my amp as the sun went down into the cool night behind me, hoping no one would notice my costume malfunction. It was glorious.

We watched our audience get more and more loose and we suddenly had a dance crowd! Happy drunks! What fun! I stayed on stage the entire time, ecstatic, though a bit drafty in the rear, not moving a muscle except my fingers, and with a grin on my face a mile wide. New territory.

***

Cut to 1980. I was playing in “Spring Fever”. There were six of us, fronted by a female singer, with an electric violinist, a pianist with a ridiculously heavy (to cary) Yamaha acoustic/electric baby grand piano, an electric guitarist, drums and of course myself on public saxophone.  Think the “Beautiful Day” of the early 80’s. We played a lot at “Keystone Berkeley”, one evening even opening for Maria Mauldar

We were playing our 3rd set in an SF Northbeach bar gig called “Gulliver’s” near Columbus and Broadway. While playing our most outlandish tune of the night “Classical Punk”  we got the audience so riled up that a fight ensued just in front of the bass player. GAK!  That would be me.

My mantra: “Someone will stop them.  1-2-3-4    Maybe not. 1-2-3-   4  Yikes – missed a beat.  I should say something to them. 1-2-3-4  Maybe not. Egads. Keep playing. 1-2-Ouch … that must hurt. OK. Someone took care of it. – 3-4. They’re outta here.”

Next tune. 1-2-3-4.

***

Decades later I was playing with “Who Tube” (my Who cover band — band name changed to protect the guilty) at an Irish bar in SF, that tolerated us and our crazy volume mainly because we were so good and drew such a lively crowd. (They usually were cool as long as we didn’t display the Union Jack flag). A few songs into our first set a guy, well into his pints, grabbed a waitress and began really whirling her around. At first she seemed OK, trying to just go with it, but when he picked her up and flipped her upside down, she retreated behind the bar. My future wife was in the crowd, and I was a bit worried until she wedged herself up on a seat between two guys at the bar, one of them her friend, Javier. Ah. Relief. Next song.

Our protagonist’s next available partner was a bar stool which he whipped around, looping and twirling joyfully while the entire room gave him    a    lot    of    space  on the suddenly empty dance floor.  A few songs (and probably a few IPAs) later he grabbed a guy as big as he was and started spinning him around.  Just as they moved in on the floor in front of me he lost control and crashed across my mic stand, through the floor monitors and onto our dinky one foot tall stage. (Why does this always happen to the bassist?) Nowhere to go.  Beer and glass and guys flying everywhere. I saw it coming and literally stepped backwards into a field of cymbals and drums, rotated my bass skyward, and just kept playing.

My mantra: “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along now. These are not the droids you are looking for.”    -Obi Wan Boomer-

More immediately, “Egads! Background vocal coming up! Sh–! No mic! Mic stand on the ground. Now What? Never mind. No problem. Lucky to be alive. Keep playing.”

Our dancer got up, bloody, yelling “I’m OK!” in that insane way that drunk people have when they are so obviously not OK, and crawled back to the bar. My hunch was that this was not his first time in this position. Nor had it been mine.

***

The weirdest / creepiest drunk-related incident happened while I was playing with my originals band Offbeats in Hayward. Just before our second set, a large drunk woman in Raiders gear asked Jay, my guitarist, if she could see his guitar just as we went on stage. He leaned over to show it to her and she tried to grab it. He pulled back and we started the set.

I walked up to the mic to do a vocal and when I moved back to my amp she was behind me on her hands and knees, on stage and going for Jay’s other guitar. I started yelling at her above the music. “Hey! Get the F— out of here! This is NOT going to happen!  Get off the f—ing stage!” She grabbed my beer, took a huge slug, spilled it on my amp and slunk off. We watched the police take her away as we loaded our gear out at the end of the night, as she was too zonked to walk or talk.

My mantra then: “Sorry. Bad choice on your part. Please examine your life. This is not working.”

***

My friend Kirk reminded me of a Who Tube gig that he saw on the same stage in Hayward where Offbeats met the “on-stage Guitar Strangler.”

Our lead singer, Mr. Z — in his Roger Daltrey persona — was doing his “rope trick,” which consisted of swinging the mic around on its cable in a carefully controlled loop that could normally only wound or maim one of the musicians on stage, and not harm anyone in the audience. But we were on a very small stage.

Anyway, someone in the audience messed with our singer, so he let fly the rope trick to end all rope tricks and let the mic swing free, I ducked, and I think he somehow managed to miss the drunk. I think. Maybe just graze him.

A few weeks prior, another drunk at another gig wasn’t so lucky. He’d hassled the band enough that Mr. Z actually clocked the guy solidly in the head with the mic and he went down, out cold.

My mantra: “Lawsuits! Black list! End of Career! Death!”

But the drunk got up and said the obligatory, “I’m OK!” (Thank you Buddha and Jerry Garcia!)  At the end of the set, I clearly remember saying, “Mr. Z, this is not such a good idea.” His response: “He deserved it.”

***

You can chose who you play with. You can’t always choose your audience. You hope to get gigs where the stage is at least tall enough that they can’t get too “up close and personal” with you and your expensive and fragile gear and irreplaceable self when they get excited.  (Alternatively, you hope for a chicken-wire barrier between you and the audience. “Keep those doggie’s rollin’, yo ho!”)

No matter what, though —  drunks, fights, bras or dead chickens thrown on stage, or even shredded trousers —  you keep on playing or it gets even weirder. If drums stop, bass solo.

Peter Laustsen’s Bass Blog

I got an email from Peter who just got the 2nd Edition of my book. He is from Norway (he lives in Bergen) and he plays and also teaches bass in a local High School. He has a great blog, sharing “Life as a Bassist and a Music Teacher.”  He is doing interesting things on his I-Pad, for example, using an App called “Good Notes” to write ideas down – free form –  in Bass Clef and he is doing all kinds of other stuff that many of us would never think of. Very cool! Even if you do not speak Norwegian, you can read his blog, via Google Translate. Just to to Google’s main page, look for “More” and then “Translate” (at the top) and in the box paste in his URL.

Here Peter’s Blog (a particular post where he also mentions my book) : http://blogg.peterlaustsen.com/post/52290869664

Thank you for sharing, Peter!

Waiting for Jimi

On the anniversary of the last Jimi Hendrix concert I saw in Berkeley 43 years ago today.

You don’t have to be in a band to play bass. You can play bass by yourself or with CDs, MP3s or with YouTube and still have a lot of fun. I still learn a lot that way. It is actually playing with the masters – past and present – and you can get a lot out of it: learning bass lines just as they are on the recording as well as learning to play the material in your own way. Playing with recordings may, or may not, help you play well with other musicians (that is another post) but it is great for learning by ear and developing your technique.

When I was young – like 1965-1968 I spent hours with vinyl records – dropping the needle on tracks again and again trying to figure out the words to songs, learning the melodies, and ultimately trying to understand what the bassist was doing, but when I first started out doing this it was even before I began to play bass. I just loved the music.

I memorized nearly every bit of Alice’s Restaurant Massacre by Arlo Guthrie, all 18 minutes and 34 seconds of it “with the circles and arrows and the paragraphs on the back of each one” and could recite it, when asked, to my friends in High School almost verbatim. It meant something. I could sing the songs of the day and thought I could hear bass, especially James Jamerson, playing on the Motown tracks. I played flute, before I took up bass, but the only Rock flautist I knew of was in the band Blues Project out of New York City. I didn’t know about Jethro Tull, yet, but I did listen to Hendrix, Santana, The Dead, The Who, The Airplane and pretty much everyone who came through town or lived in the Bay Area. It was an amazing time and place for new music. You could see almost anyone for 3 bucks and you could buy LP records on special for 3 bucks when the band was in town. Most bands played two successive shows (each night) at the Fillmore and if you didn’t catch the first one you could stay for the second. Free apples too!

It was my guitarist friend Bob who convinced me to start playing bass in 1969. Jamming on flute with him was frustrating as he could just turn up to get loud and I was almost passing out from lack of air trying to keep up. My dad would have been against drilling my silver flute to install a pickup, so that was out. Sitting on Bob’s mom’s rooftop one evening my buddy said “Do you know that the four lower strings on a guitar are exactly like a bass?” He then proceeded to teach me how to play “Boris the Spider” by The Who on his old Stella acoustic guitar (affectionately called the Cheese Grater from the effect it had on your hands.)  It became the first bass line I learned and I was hooked immediately. For Life.

Hi. My Name is Tim. I AM a music junkie… Is the program 2 steps up or 10 steps down ?

Fortunately I was lucky enough to know Bob as well as other musicians who were at about the same level of skill that I was.  They were willing to play with me even when I first began learning bass. We learned our instruments together while we also explored how to create music as a band. If we could scrounge equipment, Bob and our drummer friend “Fish” and I played in Bob’s garage. If we couldn’t borrow amps, we would play through anything, anywhere; Bob’s mom’s TV, tape recorders, anything with an amp and a speaker. A lot of those devices never sounded the same after those sessions, especially if we were fooling around with feedback or distortion. I owe our moms some thanks.

We did not play gigs but we played as if we were on stage no matter where we were; Venues known the World Over such as – “In The Garage”, “On The Patio”, “In Bob’s Mom’s Living Room” or “Outside In The Vacant Lot Next Door On A Hill” (with extension cords.) One summer, Bob and I worked in his Dad’s restaurant in Monterey.  The cover band playing there didn’t mind if we used their gear after hours so as soon after they closed, at 2am or so, we annoyed the neighbors all night long playing on an actual stage with a PA and even an echo-plex. “Stone  Free.” The (empty) crowd went CRAZY!  At dawn I would start cleaning up the restaurant … “You can get anything you want, excepting Alice” … indeed.

When the Jimi Hendrix – Band Of Gypsies – record came out I became obsessed with learning  “Power of Love”, initially just like Billy Cox played it, and then eventually throwing in 2 note chords and other things that I was already playing back then. Compared to previous Hendrix material, the tune was so Out There. I did not think anyone I knew would ever play it with me, yet I learned it anyway, dropping the needle again and again on the previous track so I could get my hands on my bass in time, ready to play every note once that track began.  I clearly remember convincing myself that if I just kept playing, consistently, the best I could, that one day Jimi Hendrix might just be driving by and would hear me. “Stop the Limo! – Who is that guy? He must be my new bassist. I must play with him!”  Apparently I was just not playing loud enough (through my used tape recorder that I used for an amp plugged into a 15 inch speaker.)   This was not as far fetched as it might seem as Jimi WAS alive and indeed was playing Berkeley soon.  Ok. We lived in Oakland but he might drive by, maybe visiting the Panthers or something. It could happen.

May 30th, 1970. Bob and I hitched over to the Community Theater to see Jimi, as we had to other locations for many a previous Hendrix, Dead, or Santana show. It was tense in Berkeley. He and I had been to the Peoples Park protests, a year before, when the National Guard and Berkeley Police were everywhere. It was our local DMZ.  A year later, just after Kent State, things still were unsettled. We had tickets for the second set at 10pm so we walked around the fountain in what was then called “Provo Park” across the street from the BCT, listening to the 1st set (which you could hear, of course, with Jimi’s three Marshall full stacks) waiting for the muse that we all followed to appear.  We were also waiting for our chance to see Jimi again.

When we got in at 10 this weird horn band “Tower of Power” opened. Look at these guys! What kind of horn is that? Are they for Real? Are they like “Chicago” or something? We had rarely seen that many non-electric musicians on any Rock stage. They killed, of course. Where are these guys from? Who is that bass player?  Do they have an album out yet? Another awesome band to start listening to. Hometown – Back to Oakland.

Jimi really out did himself that night, playing both “Machine Gun” and “Voodoo Chile” and being basically the coolest human alive, rapping about everything from the Black Panthers, People’s Park, and Vietnam, to self determination and how “this is our own little world tonight.” Very much the Sky Church effect. Testify! That wild cross between hip casual excellence and inspired improvisation.  Never sounding the same with these very familiar yet always new tunes. The band was so solid with Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox – in many ways the best lineup of his career – and billed as The Experience again instead of Band of Gypsies.

As we left the show, the last time I saw Jimi play, and we walked up to the Greek Theater to hang out and talk in the night air, I noticed a serious high pitched sound in my head, not there before, that did not leave for hours. Of course I attributed it to the preceding assault I had subjected myself to but it was definitely my first experience with hearing loss. After years of subsequent sonic abuse, that sound is now somewhat permanently a feature of my daily life, usually only going away when I am onstage or otherwise, equally, unstressed, calm and happy, but at the time who knew about earplugs?

Jimi never stopped by to play with me. Huge surprise. I kept practicing and waiting. No one knew he had only a few months left to live, so maybe he just ran out of time. He probably got lost on the way to my house. Maybe he had some ringing in his ears too.

When he died I had to give up that dream of playing with him. I was heartbroken. I began to realize that the idea of leaving High School to play music full time might leave me ill prepared for a lot of what life seemed to be about. It took another decade, but I eventually developed a Plan B that later became Plan A and redefined music as the second full time obsession in my life instead of the first. It happens. I realized that I wanted to keep living in relative health and happiness so it was probably the right thing to do. To quote Jimi,  “Who Knows?”

So I started my bass career in two worlds, playing in a group and studying relentlessly on my own, listening to the masters. I have not stopped playing bass since 1969. I have been in a lot of bands, played a lot of stages and indeed made significant chunks of my income from playing bass. I sure as hell had a lot of fun doing it too. I still play nearly every day. I also do other things. I learned to write by hanging out with my drummer at the time, Mick, who kept saying ‘We have this book in mind, you need to write it” but that is, alas, another blog post too.

So what does this have to do with my book? It is probably the whole “path I did not travel” thing. I keep saying “I wrote this book because I wanted to own it”. In some ways, this book has become is my life’s work, though I have also done a lot of other things in life. I am pretty happy about sharing a lot of what I know in an organized way to a lot of people, all at once, instead of one bass lesson at a time, to one person. I think there are a lot of folks “playing real loud” hoping someone will play with them or just hear them. I think if you learn the common grooves and language of music, it makes it easier to play with other folks. But that is another post too.

My guess is that if Jimi had cruised by and found me, this book would not exist. I probably would not be alive today, probably having succumbed to the excessive lifestyle of the 60’s. Purple Haze. It has been a good trade off. I have to say, though, that it would have been amazing to play with Jimi, just once, and I do still miss him. Straight Ahead.

The 2nd Edition – Details

The new 2nd Edition is an update and expansion of the original book which was published in 2009. It provides bass patterns for virtually all popular styles, and includes more than 400 bass grooves now in both standard musical notation and tablature. The 192 audio examples are now twice the length on the two CDs (recorded with their corresponding drum grooves.) In addtion there is a DVD with 92 video examples showing three camera angles. Each chapter covers particular styles or families of styles. These contain both primary examples and variations on those examples. The history of the style as well as characteristics such as tone, gear, guidelines, and chord progressions are included along with an extensive discography, glossary, and an appendix for Standup bassists.

The book is available now online and in stores. The 1st Edtion is still available as an e-Book but will be updated to the 2nd Edition soon. 

The 2nd Edition Cover

Bassists Bible 2nd Edition Cover

Welcome to the Bassist’s Bible blog site. Now that the work is done on the 2nd Edition I will be sharing excerpts from the book as well as other bass related info. This may include history, written examples, audio examples or video from the book or thoughts and concepts about bass in the context of songwriting or playing in bands.

In case you might be wondering, that is a picture of me (Tim Boomer) on the cover. Micaela Marsden is the designer and she and my publisher Chaz Bufe really liked this picture. I am not sure I would have chosen to have my mug on the book cover but my designer and publisher disagreed.