Talk Amongst Yourselves - I'll Give You A Topic

[Chad Thorne]

I'm a little ferklempt.

 

One reason I like bass is because I can move from one genre of music to another pretty easily. If I don't know every little lick and trick I can still usually come up with something that sounds o.k., and that's truer for me with bass than guitar. It's this experience that makes it easier for me to see that all music is interconnected, that if you understand one musical scheme it's easier to understand another, that, as Tshaka has said, "The blues is the roots and everything else is the fruits."

 

Discuss.

[Ross Brown]

Don't you hate when no one replies right away. Doesn't help the ferklempt much.

 

I am just beginning to play "other" types of music during my daily practice. Not that I will end up playing it in a gig, just fun to expand my horizons, even if badly.

 

I also like putting on a new blues CD and try to play along like I am at a jam and have to start right away without any cues.

[Dave Brown]

At the end of the Dvorak "New World Symphony" (written in the 19th century) the basses and cellos play an arpeggio 1-3-5-6-1-6-5-3-1.

 

So did all the rockabilly musicians in the 50's.

 

The second movement of the Beethoven Piano Sonata Op. 14, No. 1 contains a series of sequential ii-V chords that is almost exactly like the opening theme of Bill Evans "Waltz for Debbie."

 

In Handel's "Messiah" the aria "He Shall Feed his Flock" begins with an alto soloist, and at the emotional center of the selection, Handel modulates up by a P4 and a soproano sings the solo. So do the Oak Ridge Boys in "When I sing For Him" from Sky High.

 

Musical concepts and their emotional impetus are universal; composers discover and rediscover these things all the time. They put to use the power of God that is inherent in universal musicality for whatever good (or bad) purpose they intend.

 

Discuss.

[davio]

...bongos in the back...

 

I dig. *snap, snap*

 

My band had mixed feelings when I started playing a bassline to a song we were writing. The bassline fit perfectly but as some of them noticed right off the bat (heh...wait for it), I was playing the theme from Danny Elfman's Batman. Hard to imagine that in a hardcore/screamo setting.

[Eric VB]

Well, there are some genres that can be more demanding in terms of technique than others. But yeah, if I can keep everything on fretted electric bass guitar and play fingerstyle, there are still quite a few genres that work well with that.

 

As for Dave Brown's topic, I totally agree. In fact, I will go so far as to say that even the original classical pieces that were later copied were probably copies themselves, incorporating music that we're just not familiar with today because there is no record of it.

 

Music is old. Really old. Imagine if we had some sort of notation still around today for the music made by the same people that did the cave drawings.

 

The "oldest known song" is 4,000 years old. It's a bit more complex than what people thought a song that old should be.

 

 

Anyway, to link this back to the original thought, think of all the different ways mankind has tried to produce bass sounds since the beginning of time. Is the electric bass guitar the most general modern instrument to reproduce every bass line for every style of music today, let alone every style of music for the entire history of music?

 

Discuss.

[Chad Thorne]

Originally posted by Dave Brown:

At the end of the Dvorak "New World Symphony" (written in the 19th century) the basses and cellos play an arpeggio 1-3-5-6-1-6-5-3-1.

 

So did all the rockabilly musicians in the 50's.

 

The second movement of the Beethoven Piano Sonata Op. 14, No. 1 contains a series of sequential ii-V chords that is almost exactly like the opening theme of Bill Evans "Waltz for Debbie."

 

In Handel's "Messiah" the aria "He Shall Feed his Flock" begins with an alto soloist, and at the emotional center of the selection, Handel modulates up by a P4 and a soproano sings the solo. So do the Oak Ridge Boys in "When I sing For Him" from Sky High.

 

Musical concepts and their emotional impetus are universal; composers discover and rediscover these things all the time. They put to use the power of God that is inherent in universal musicality for whatever good (or bad) purpose they intend.

 

Discuss.

There you go again, Dave, gettin' all erudite on us...

 

Yes. I agree that Dvorak was the original rockabilly.

 

My point was maybe a bit less broad; I was thinking about being able to go from blues, to rock, to reggae, to country, to polka, to jazz, to funk, to folk, to (in my case) contemporary Christian music, on an instrument where the chops are a lot more transferable from genre to genre than, say, guitar. And an electric bass guitar could also play at least pizzicato bass lines in a classical piece. Wouldn't that be a hoot? And wasn't it here that someone said that Bach would be playing jazz today, given his penchant for improvising over "walking" bass lines.

[Eric VB]

Originally posted by Chad:

And an electric bass guitar could also play at least pizzicato bass lines in a classical piece. Wouldn't that be a hoot?

I'm sure it was a hoot to play mandobass in the mando orchestras that were popular a century ago. "Reprint" from a \'79 Frets article .

 

Some pics of mandobasses can be found on the links on this page .

 

Like many acoustic bass instruments designed to be plucked, mandobasses aren't very loud (from what I've read). They seem to be very rare today.

[thabottomend]

I remember an applicable quote form Charlie Daniels........

 

"There ain't but twelve notes of music in the world. Somethin' will always sound like somethin' else."

 

I also remember reading a letter to the editor in Rolling Stone in the late '80s by someone who had claimed to do the math based on the 12-note structure of music. His claim was that we would use up all the possible combinations of original music by the year 2001. If the world survived that long. What a fruitcake.

[Big Red 67]

I have found being a bass player has alowed me to see more conecctions between different kinds of music. I still say that if you hate rap, blame Dylan.

[Big Red 67]

I have found being a bass player has alowed me to see more conecctions between different kinds of music. I still say that if you hate rap, blame Dylan.

[Big Red 67]

Sorry bout the Double Double.

 

Oh yeah, Bach started heavy metal!

 

And he was a bitching bass player.

[jeremy c]

What I think BigRed is talking about is the style of music called Talking Blues which Bob Dylan used on some songs.

 

Bob got it from Woody Guthrie. The earliest recorded example of talking blues goes back to the twenties which means that it was probably happening for quite a while before that.

 

None of which has any relevance to the topic at hand, whatever it is.

 

It does seem to be easier for a bassist to switch styles than it is for a guitarist. Guitar styles have so many little idiomatic things in them that it takes many years to master one style. There are some people that can play in several styles....but very few that can play in all the styles. Tommy Tedesco comes to mind.

[Big Red 67]

 

I do love to be irrelevant! You don't think that music history is relevant to playing different styles and understanding how to move smoothly from one to another? I sternly disagree.

[Dave Brown]

I don't think knowing music history is essential to playing different styles and switching.

 

I'm saying good ideas re-invent themselves continuously through music.

 

And if you put a million immortal monkeys in a room with a million 1953 Fender Precisions you'd eventually wind up with an entire Jamerson album of basslines. But it'd be a hell of a mess and a waste of several nice instruments that suffered weird endings and some intended consequences like the breakaway group that had a hit with a feedback and crash version of Neil Young's "Old Man."

 

And don't ask me about the flys.

[wade_g]

One of the first rappers.

 

http://www.artistdirect.com/Images/Sources/AMGPORTRAITS/music/portrait200/drp000/p084/p08440u49tq.jpg

[Mudcat]

Originally posted by Dave Brown:

..I'm saying good ideas re-invent themselves continuously through music...

I'm certain that's what George Harrison and Ray Parker Jr. would say.