• I’m just naturally talented, so I don’t need to any more
• I did my practice in my 20′s (whatever that means) and that’s me done
• I don’t have the time (kids, gigs, X-factor, drinking) top the list
• I’ve got my technique and time down so I just learn extra things when and if I fancy
• I’m bored with the instrument and no longer inspired etc…

People say you shouldn’t compare music to sports, but since I’m a big tennis fan, I’m going to give it a go.  To me, it’s the difference between an amateur league tennis player and a sportsman of the calibre of Rafael Nadal.  A club league tennis player can go onto the court and hit 10 forehands and maybe 7 of them land in and even 2/3 look really great.  When these good shots come off, they can almost convince themselves in that moment that they’re Rafa Nadal drilling Roger Federer into submission and go home feeling like a hero.

But it’s those other 3 shots that really matter.  This is why Rafael Nadal is on the court every day at 9am for 4 hours hitting 1000′s of balls. I don’t imagine him screaming “Vamos!” in ecstasy after every shot either.

In music, I’ve come across the same.  A good player that’s stopped practicing can occasionally hit the heights now and then and play a good 16 bars here and maybe a great grooving chorus fill there.  But, if the regular practicing has stopped there’s always a giveaway fumbled 2 bars, an out-of-the pocket fill or badly executed run, all of which is a dead giveaway.  The consistency is not there.

Marcus Miller is a musician that I look up to in a big way and many consider one of the most talented of his generation.  In his own words “You never become a master in music”.  We’re the lucky ones as musicians, as in sports you run your course and then retire and have to find something new.  I imagine Marcus Miller in an old folks home aged 95 still figuring new things out on the bass.  I hope that’s me too.  Here’s a man that’s still working on his playing daily, even with all he’s achieved and his considerable natural ability.  

What are the rest of us waiting for?

1. Quincy Jones – “Q” (Autobiography)

“We had the best jazz band in the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That’s when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”

Quincy Jones’ career spans 5 decades, 27 Grammy awards and has taken him from the highest echelons of Jazz trumpet in the 1950s to Sinatra Arranger in the 60′s and then dynamite producer in the 70′s and 80′s.  This autobiography encompasses everything from his incredibly tough start with his mother incarcerated in a mental institution through to his frustrations with the jazz scene and eventual move to arranging some of the biggest tracks the world has seen with Michael Jackson.

2. Jaco Pastorius – “The extraordinary and tragic life of” (Bill Milkowski)

“I grew up in Florida where there was no real musical prejudice.  Everyone was playing everything from Suban music to symphonic music… keep listening… keep your ears open”


Although this book is a bit controversial as some of the stories are of questionable authenticity and source, and did upset part of his surviving family, it still remains as an amazing source of information and inspiring background on the self-proclaimed “World’s greatest Bassplayer”.  Worth it alone for the story of Jaco ripping the frets out of his Fender Jazz pre-gig.

3. Bill Evans – “How My Heart Sings” (Peter Pettinger)

“I don’t consider myself as talented as many… but that was an advantage because I didn’t have a great facility immediately so I had to be more analytical and build something”


A great book written by classical pianist and jazz fan Peter Pettinger.  Recounts everything from Bill Evan’s wrestling with his own inadequacies as a musician (self perceived) to the point of visiting a hypnotist at the age of 28 to check if he really should be pursuing Jazz and Music and then his eventual success in his 30′s and beyond with Miles Davis, the recording on the biggest jazz album of all time and his success as a solo artist.

4. Jay – Z – “Decoded” (Autobiography)

“Before… I was aware of the power of my thoughts, staying focused and weeding out thoughts that sabotage.”

Although Decoded is as much an insight into the lyrics behind a lot of his rap, his perspective on a lot of his tracks, and at times a bit self-indulgent about how great he feels his work is, there’s a lot of of insight into the reality of being born into the projects in the US, his intital life as a hustler, before his single-minded dedication to his particular musical craft, which would put a lot of wanna be jazz college players to shame.

5. Hampton Hawes – “Raise Up Off Me” (Autobiography)

“What difference does it make where you go to learn? Toshiko, 8,000 miles from the source burned the keyboard like Bud Powell and Andre Watts plays Mozart like he’s tuned into the grave.” 

Hampton Hawes was one of the most talented of the bebop and hard-bop piano players.  Oscar Peterson was one of his biggest fans, but in contrast to Oscar, Hampton was a live wire and lived one of the craziest lives of anyone in Jazz.  This is one of the best documents of the jazz world and Hampton’s insane path, before prison and an eventual Presidential pardon by JFK.

After a heavy week of Tech Rehearsals and soundchecks (left) in Sao Paulo it’s great to see the Thriller Live show finally come together and finally be able to play some MJ bass lines for the good people of Brazil.  We landed in Rio about 10 days ago and began with our first week of press and preview shows last Monday and public shows all last week.

I’d like to thank the hard work of all the backstage, sound and tech guys both from Brazil and the UK for putting things together so well, in the face of a big language barrier to boot, and in particular give a shout out to local sound guy and bass player Silney Marcondes for being a legend generally and offering to pick up his car in Sao Paulo and drive us around Rio to hit the Samba bars !

We’ve all been doing our best to learn some of the local lingo.  Probably though, the Brazilian cast are getting tired of us continually asking “How is one today madam?” in the best possible most polite terms…  Luckily Silney and also one of the tech guys who seems to be the Brazilian equivalent of “Bez” from the Happy Mondays have begun to balance things out with some more colorful choice phrases.

My Stage Setup

A quick run down of my current stage setup while I’m here in Rio.  I’m using:

• Bass A – MM V Fender Jazz (B-G)
• Bass B – Fodera Imperial 5 String (B-G)
• Pedal Board of

1. EBS Octabass
2. EBS UniChorus
3. EBS BassIQ
4. Boss TU-3 Tuner
5. EBS Microbass II splitter

Then all of this gets fed to front of house, and we’re listening via the standard Avioms on stage, through some Sure 535 monitors….

J

I’m in Brazil!  I’m out here playing bass for the 2013 Thriller Live Brazil tour. Right now we’re in Sao Paulo doing Tech Rehearsals for the show which is taking in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Sao Paulo.  We arrived Saturday night and on Thursday we head to Rio de Janeiro for the opening nights of the tour at the Citybank Hall.

Firstly a big thankyou to EBS Sweden for sorting me out with some pedals (Uni Chorus, Octave, bass IQ and bass A/B) as well as DR strings for their help with some fantastic Hi-Beams which are going to be going on this puppy…. A second hand Marcus Miller 5 string I found in Leicester which has now leapfrogged my Fodera (yes that’s right) and become the main bass for the tour and maybe who knows, everything after……

After a late night search of the web, a double Espresso and an early morning drive to Leicester was needed to try out said bass, which was originally planned as the backup bass on stage for the whole tour.  After tech call number one though, I’m thinking to myself ‘my poor Fodera isn’t going to see much of Brazil!’.  This thing’s got a great raw vintage Jazz tone and much as the idea of playing a signature bass pains me (lol) I think I can get used to this when the open E gives you this much bottom end joy!

I’m sitting in the hotel, it’s midnight here and having brought a portable studio with me to Brazil, I thought i’d set things up and record the new bass, for all the world to hear.  So here’s something I…. made earlier…. just the new Marcus 5 string and my Brazil inspired noodlings.

I’m going to update this blog weekly for the next few months while we’re touring Brazil, so expect to catch up with all sorts of things here!

Obrigado!  Johnny

Mr Time….. (Imagine a character out of South Park looking something along the lines of ‘Mr Hanky’ when you try and put a picture to him)  I think you can divide good time into 3 main areas…..

I think you have to have these three elements really together in a big way, to consider yourself to have great time.  If any of the 3 corners or elements are particularly weak, then boom! – the Triangle collapses and Mr Hankey is not far away and that’s what the groove is going to feel like.

The three elements:

• Tempo – How well you can hold the pulse of a groove over the period of the song – A good way to work on this is using a “disappearing metronome” where you take 16 bars of a click track, then in the next 16 bars have 3 bars click 1 bar rest, next 16 2 bars click, 2 bars rest, then next 16 1 bar click, 3 bars rest etc… getting harder and harder.  Then keep playing and try and stay in time in the gaps.
• Rhythms / Subdivisions – How accurate and consistently you can really play the syncopations like 16ths and swung 16ths or triplet 8ths. Learning to play drums helps this a lot. Indian vocalisation of rhythms is another way for the funk challenged.
• Feel – The most mysterious of the 3.  Assuming you are holding the tempo and playing your subdivisions in the right place and in time, – this is about the minute amount you either push (ahead) or lay back (pull back) on the groove.  Listen to Paul Chambers pushing Philly Joe’s ride cymbal on a tune like ‘So What’ or how Pino Palladino lays right back on D’Angelo’s ‘Chicken Grease’.

A select few seem to naturally have ‘perfect’ time, (lucky) but for everyone else it’s something something to continue to work on as a musician.  Yeah, the old school might say ‘don’t play with a metronome’ – but that whole argument comes from an era where music wasn’t recorded on a Mac with a click track and quantized.  And now we grow up listening to that metronomic vibe from Samplers and so on, it’s about time we were able to hold tempo, play on the right part of the beat, and lay down some decent subdivisions.

Amen….!

To quote my good friend Adam Kovacs, a great conga player and percussionist…. “You cannot really be called a ‘good musician’ unless you’ve got good time”.

While we can rush around worrying about scales, soloing, harmony and technique, this is all 99% redundant in terms of bass playing if we’re not truly listening to the song and the music. That is, redundant in terms of the first goal (you’d hope) of trying to serve the music & make the music sound better with the bass.

Here’s some things I’ve been trying lately, to really work on my listening.

Try transcribing a piece of music so you can play the original bass part (fills and everything) perfectly from memory. The better you know it, the better. Then write on paper all the different instruments you can hear in mix.

If there are 10 different instruments, now play along 10 x but listen completely to each of those instruments one at a time. At the end of each time through you should be able to say (for example) ” – the Hi Hat becomes more open at the end of each chorus after you did this with the Hi-hat part…..” or “the piano goes to arpeggios in the bridge”. This only works if you can play the whole line without worrying about technique & positions too much.

Some of the clearest and most lucid advice I’ve ever heard on good ‘bass playing’ (as in bass in it’s traditional role as an instrument which supports the music and makes everything else sound as good as it can be) was Lionel Richie on recording with different bassists:

“At the end of the recording take, the B league player always asks one very important question. How did that sound? …. – If you have to ask…. you missed it” (Lionel Richie)

And conversely one of the most confused things another bassist ever said to me was…. “Jazz star (so and so’s) gig was okay, but the bassist (a famous guy) didn’t really play anything a bass player would be interested in”.

He went to the gig to listen to the bassist, not the music.

We should all aim to try and learn to better serve the music as bassists & become like the rare Long-Eared Jerboa above.

I’ve been transcribing a quick cheat sheet chart for the track Toto by Rosanna. Here’s a snapshot I took with the iPhone. It’s by no means perfect but enough to get through the track 90%.

“Rosanna” is tune that musos & drummers usually get quite excited about, the drum shuffle played by the late Jeff Porcaro is one of the classic drum grooves. The bass is worth a look too though – featuring David Hungate on bass (though it’s Mike Porcaro in the video I think)

Enjoy

Download the PDF here

Start by trying to play a C major chord using a real C in the bottom (played normally) but the E, and G (3rd and 5th) as harmonics.  There are a few options… depending on how many strings your bass has and where you play the fretted C.  Then move on and try to come up with all the diatonic chords in a major scale – so Dm, Em, F major, G major, Am , B diminished.

Try to come up chords for all the chords in every key…. Sometimes you may need to break the rules about what you’re fretting etc…

Now try the same technique as above (all the major chords) but using just harmonics – i.e. for C major you can use C harmonic on D string, E harmonic on A string and G harmonic on G string at 5th fret….

From here, go back to the chords you wrote out from before and now try and find as many of the 4 part chords in every key…. i.e. for C major try Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7, Fmaj7, G7, Amin7, B half diminished and so on….

FOR EXAMPLE C maj 7th (above) (C E G B) would be E in 3rd fret E string, G on 3rd fret (bit higher) A string B on 4th fret (high) G string and C (fretted) on the D string 10th fret…. (best played as an arpeggio, harmonics first or rolled!)

Now write a piece of music that just uses harmonics. ;-)

This version is taken from a live rendition if found on Youtube which you can check out here. The original doesn’t have the pumping intro and uses a more notesy bass riff and has a slower groove. What i’ve done here is combine the intro I liked with the famous groove on the original. The fill at the end is the fill you can here on the original version near the end after they’ve moved up a semitone into the key of Db.

Click on the thumbmails below for the transcription….

Intro

The intro begins with sparse hits from the b7 to the Root of the C7 chord.  Then it goes straight into a pretty cool unison section based around C minor.  Kind of reminds me of some of the cool hits section D’Angelo did with the Soultronics in recent times.

Main Riff

The main riff is pretty quick so the timing of the 16ths is quite a challenge.  Usually I find rocking your head, whole body and anything else you can find in rhythm and doing this before you even play is key to getting in that groove.

Outro Fill

This is based around a Db 7 chord using a pretty standard blues type patter but with the funky twist at the end. R 3 5 R b7 6 5 3 etc…

Get “Fire” album here….

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