By Sean O’Bryan Smith
Greetings fellow low-enders,
Forgive me for taking entirely too much time between articles but rest assured that I have been doing my part to save the world from less than stellar grooves and over-extended trumpet solos.  Seriously, all is well and I wanted to hit on some overlooked parts of the world of bass. Those of us that are considered educator’s to some degree get entirely caught up in the mechanics of our instrument. We’ll spend days upon end talking about the musical relevance of each and every …

by k-dub, keeperodafunk 
Hellooooooo kiddies!  I’m back after a long absence.  Sorry ’bout that.  I’ll try not to let it happen as often in the future.  
A while back, I was attempting to teach a student some walking bass lines over a ii-V-I cadence.  By the way, in roman numeral parlance, a lower case numeral means this chord ii, is minor.  Just so ya know.  Anyway, I have been playing walking bass lines so long that it didn’t occur to me that what seems easy to me may be unfathomable to an …

by k-dub, keeperodafunk
On October 5th at Cafe 290,  Joe Gransden, http://www.joegransden.com/ a fabulous trumpet player and vocalist, along with the Jazz Orchestra Atlanta , http://orchestraatlanta.org/ featured Eddie Gomez on upright bass.  The band performs regularly at the club on the first and third Thursday of the month usually featuring various artist.  So, if you are in the Southeast and love big band music, this band is well worth the drive. 
This night the crowd was lucky enough to see and hear world renown bassist, Eddie Gomez, on a couple of tunes.  …

Stefon Pizzuto  
Welcome to part three in our series on slap bass. By now you should have a good foundation in proper thumbing technique, as well as a basic understanding of some of the more advanced concepts we discussed. As with our last lesson this lesson builds upon previous material so make sure you are comfortable and competent with the techniques in lessons one and two before attempting the stuff shown below, as you will be incorporating elements from both lessons in these new exercises.
Lesson one taught us the basic concepts …

by Stefon Pizzuto    
The start of summer brings us to part two in our series on slap bass. Our last get-together introduced us to the techniques behind slap, providing us with a foundation upon which we will build. We learned that slap is comprised of two right hand motions – forearm movement and wrist rotation. We also focused on the two main components that couple to create the slap sound – thumbing and popping.
     The last lesson contained exercises that outlined these concepts. I would like to begin by reminding you …