www.stevelawson.net

Brand New Music With Daniel Berkman

2012-04-24T09:16:05Z

I’ve got new recordings backing up here – too many lovely things that need releasing into the wild. Next on the list is definitely the album with Mike Outram (now over 2 years over due!) but later this year, I’ll be putting out a recording taken from the two shows I did with Daniel Berkman in San Francisco in January.

Daniel is an incredible multi-intrumentalist – on these gigs he played Gravikord (electric Kora), Handsonic (electronic percussion) and synth sounds running on his laptop, played via a TINY keyboard. The versatility of his sound-world from these three elements is mind-blowing, and he proved to be one of the most sensitive and adaptable improvisation collaborators I’ve ever met. He does a lot of looping himself, so like Michael Manring, has an innate awareness of what’s needed to make loops that are ‘human’, rather than metric, ‘work’. On this tune, the drum parts all pivot on him playing the snare on beat 3, ignoring the (hugely variable) downbeat of the bar, and playing ‘in time’ with wherever I happened to put it that time

Anyway, other than a brief soundcheck, this is the first thing we ever played together – enjoy! Please feel free to comment, ‘favourite’ it if you like it, and share the link around. it all helps a lot

A Lovely Mention in Bass Player Magazine…

2012-04-16T16:44:18Z

Last month’s Bass Player magazine had a feature, written by the excellent Ed Friedland, about Looping. (great choice of writer for such an article – Ed’s played some amazing music himself using looping devices.)

Anyway, there’s a section within it about players that you need to check out, and first on the list is me Hurrah!

here’s a link to the whole article

And here’s the quote about me:

“Several bassists have taken looping to new heights, and Steve Lawson (stevelawson.net) is certainly at the forefront of the scene. Steve has toured the world as a solo bassist for years, and has released a trove of CDs featuring his unique blend of musicianship and effect mastery. Steve says, “Looping has enabled me to soundtrack the inside of my head without outside interference. I would not be playing solo if it weren’t for looping—it’s as simple as that.” “

Which is nice

Talking About Twitter… Again.

2012-04-10T12:36:18Z

If you remember, three years ago (I know, 3 years on the internet is like 500 years in normal life – sorry ’bout that) Andrew Dubber and I made a lil’ video talking about Twitter for musicians.

It’s proved very popular over the years, and has been incorporated into the curriculum on a number of music courses.

So a couple of weeks back, we recorded a follow up. Here it is. Enjoy

Twitter – 3 years on from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

London Bass Guitar Show and My new Markbass Amps(with video!)

2012-03-07T12:34:14Z

This last weekend was all kinds of fun – I had two days at the London Bass Guitar Show and a wonderful improv gig in Derby…

The bass guitar show was my first ‘official’ outing for Markbass - Having been using the Markaudio PA gear for about 3 years (those incredible tiny speakers you’ve seen us use on UK house concerts? Mark Audio), I’ve just got a pair of unbelievable combos from Markbass – the Combo 121 Lites, designed in conjunction with Alain Caron.

So my masterclass on Sunday morning at the bass show was the first time I’d had to really turn them up and see what they can do (they sounded amazing at home, but what about in a gig situation? And yeah, they sounded remarkable. Loud, clear, and able to deal with whatever craziness I threw at them. Markbass have a new UK distributor, who were lovely, friendly, helpful clever people. Look out for more Markbass-related fun in the near future…

The rest of the bass show was fabulous – it’s WAY bigger than London really has any right to be hosting. Partly, I guess, it’s due to the 25+ years of groundwork that the Bass Centre did in establishing bass as an instrument to be proud of – they took the interest in bass generated by Mark King’s rise to superstardom in the mid 80s and opened a shop, organised events and generally built a sense that exciting things were happening on the instrument. Fast forward a quarter of a century and we have a show with (I think) close to a thousand people at it, featuring performances and masterclasses by some world class musicians.

I caught masterclasses by Jon Thorne, Yolanda Charles and Doug Wimbish, all of whom were really informative and inspiring. I have quotes from all three stuck in my head that will make their way into how I make music. Doug’s masterclass was particularly fun as half way through a tune he wandered over and put his bass round my neck - ‘your turn’! It was a lot of fun, and Dave Marks who was on ‘actual bass’ for that tune, shifted the feel beautifully and we made a good noise for a while, before I handed the bass back to Doug and he passed it onto Yolanda, who as well as being one of my favouritest people in the world is one of the most brilliant bassists I’ve ever come across. I’m glad I went first, that’s all I’ll say

It was great to catch up with so many old friends – the show was littered with the great and the good of the world of bass – Paul Turner, Dave Swift, TM Stevens, Svetlana Vassileva, Dave Marks, Paul Lancaster, John Currie, alongside bass gear luminaries such as John East, Martin Peterson, Paul Sips, Sheldon Dingwall, Dave Boonshoft and Dave Avenius from Aguillar, Barry Moorhouse from the Bass Centre, Hugh Manson and Stewart Spector.

Shows like this remind me just how many bassists I’ve taught over the years – so many former students of mine now off doing all kinds of amazing things. I was grinning all weekend at their stories.

So anyway, here are three videos, taken by the lovely Dave Marks, at my masterclass on Sunday. The first is an explanation of my processing/looping set-up, and the other two are performance. Enjoy!

A tour round the toys:

Cover of Hello:

Small Marvels, from “11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything”:

What is Success? Starting from scratch

2012-02-29T17:35:02Z

“What Happens Now For Music?” is a growth area of exploration, both for academics and industry analysts, consultants and representative bodies.

The old machine that has controlled things for the last 40-50 years have their lobbyists and their clumsy, internet-ruining political agenda, but for the rest of us who give a shit about little things like ethics, art and culture, the questions are WAY bigger than ‘how can we pretend we’re making less money while actually making more money so that we can make EVEN more money, and still blame the internet for our made up failure?’

No, the bigger questions start with challenging the foundational principles of what the relationship is between a culture and its soundtrack, and how we can define success for those musicians who are somehow meaningfully engaged in the process of creating that soundtrack.

Because, as we’ve explored here many times before, the old model was wholly unsustainable and unsuccessful in any meaningful measure for the vast majority of musicians who engaged with it. Even for many of those that we perceive as successes, it took them acquiescing to a wholly alien notion of success as defined by the worst excesses of Late 20th Century hypermodernity. One completely at odds with their reasons for making music in the first place. In oh-so-many cases, a career in music became a shit day job that stopped them making music that they cared about.

So when we start exploring what ‘success’ might look like, or who the success stories are that are emerging from the new music ecosystem, we need to throw out discredited notions of success that somehow link success to abstract metrics of ‘reach’ and ‘audience’, and certainly quash any notion that fame was a meaningful indicator of anything related to success.

As Nik Kershaw so succinctly put it on an episode of Trisha years ago – Fame was the downside to success.

I tweeted a list of possible metrics for success a couple of hours ago, and I’ll repeat them here:

Sustainability – can I keep doing this?
Independence – creative, economic and strategic independence – what music am I making? How am I funding it and how is it making that money back, and what’s the bigger plan?
Progress – linked to strategy – is my own artistic and personal progress happening in a way that I’m comfortable with? How would I measure that?
Fun – seriously, being a musician is the greatest privilege in the world, whether or not you get paid for it. The joy of making music should never get obscured by the slog that getting into the position of being able to make music for other people often becomes. How do I define my own satisfaction with the Big Project of my music life?

Those are the big questions, and none of them are helpfully answered by looking at chart positions, stadium appearances, TV credits or numbers of Twitter followers.

They change from artist to artist, and given that ‘success’ can now exist quite happily and sustainably with a core audience of only a few hundred people, and can even be enhanced by the performer having an outside source of income, we need to be looking at some much more foundational defining questions before we start trying to match like for like in the process of building alternatives to the myth machine of the 20th century.

So, musicians, what is success for you? Did you have to let go of a long-held dream of super-stardom to find what you were looking for? Do you still – deep-down – actually want to be a rock star? Is your future so bright you gotta wear shades, while playing to 30 people in a friend’s living room? Answers in the comments, please

Grace And Gratitude & Behind Every Word, now £3 each

2012-02-20T13:59:42Z

On occasion, I still come across people who are uncomfortable with the economics of ‘pay what you think it’s worth‘. Or ‘pay what you want‘. Or ‘name your price‘. Whichever way you want to describe it.

It’s not really that surprising – we’ve precious little precedent for a transaction like this, especially as it relates to ‘ubiquitous’ products like digital downloads of music. We’re used to things having a fixed price that somehow is marketed to us as representing the value of the thing, and then we choose to pay it or not. If things are available in lots of places then we shop around for the cheapest legal source.

That’s not what’s happening with ‘pay what you think it’s worth‘, obviously:

The cheapest legal version is free.
But why should it be?
How does value translate into money?
Why should you pay?
How does paying for something that’s be offered to you for free make you feel?

All questions that are quite alien to us.

So, while the new stuff is still priced like that, I’ve made two of my most successful older albums available for £3, fixed price. No ‘£3 or more’, nothing to make you feel like this is anything other than a normal transaction You can, of course, go and buy either of them on iTunes or Amazon, if you want them for more money at lower resolution with worse sleeve-notes. But hey, that’s up to you.

Here they are – listen here, then drop £3 on them if you dig what you hear:

Behind Every Word by Steve Lawson

Grace And Gratitude by Steve Lawson

Michael Manring’s thoughts on Believe In Peace

2012-02-15T13:54:10Z

Reviews and comments about my new album Believe In Peace are still coming in. This one cropped up on TalkBass.com from Michael Manring – Michael is probably my single biggest influence in becoming a solo bassist and has been deeply supportive of my music from the very start. In this instance, I sent him a download code for the album but he chose to pay for it anyway! Here’s what he said about it:

“What a beautiful recording! This is perhaps the best argument yet that the bass is a versatile, deeply expressive instrument and in the hands of a brilliant and visionary artist like Steve, is capable of making music of enormous emotional and musical depth. Please buy a copy and share it with your friends and family. I think they’ll thank you for it!”

In other Believe In Peace news, a track from it is featured on the latest Aural Innovations radio show, listenable/downloadable here. Jerry Kranitz who presents the show reviewed most of my early albums on his site, and has been a great supporter of my music over the years (he’s also featured in Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack book, if you’ve read that…)

here’s the album, listen, download, pay whatever you think it’s worth. I’ve got a LOT of new music that needs editing/mixing/mastering and it’s way easier to justify the time it takes if the music is making some money

Believe In Peace by Steve Lawson

Every Artist Is A KickStarter Project.

2012-02-14T12:45:50Z

There have been some amazing success stories on Kickstarter of late, not least of all CASH Music raising their $30K in 72 hours. Brilliant.

What’s worth noting, however, is that pretty much every musician’s career is a Kickstarter project – the work we have out now are the incentives, and the money raised makes it possible to do more elaborate things going forward.

If we happen to have ‘pay what you think it’s worth‘ mechanism, the ‘it‘ doesn’t just have to be the collection of music in question. It’s an invitation to be part of the ongoing financial viability of diverting time and resources into making music our focus.

No-one in their right mind is going to stop making music because they aren’t making money from it – that’s a load of bullshit peddled by lobbyists – but time spent making music is time not available for paying the bills doing something else, so when music makes money, the money can go to making more music. (as an aside, there are some very interesting comments about this idea in the new interview with Steven Wilson, by the ever-brilliant Anil Prasad.)

Part of Kickstarter (and Pledge Music)’s success comes from the permission it gives people to get excited about The Big Project, rather than being stuck with the old model that paying for music is about getting a product and the stories around music are the stuff that goes in magazines so that we know when the product will be available. Now, we can see the recordings as a document of music-making, as something to enjoy, to soundtrack our lives with, to tell stories with and be told stories by. And we can be part of any number of those stories.

It’s why some people choose to pay WAY over the normal price of a CD for the download albums from my Bandcamp page (gawd bless bandcamp!) – not because the music itself *should* cost that, but because the experience of being a part of it is special, the option to say thank you in such a tangible way, the chance to put a value on their relationship with the music, with my story, in a tangible way. And of course, to acknowledge that most musicians are broke and will REALLY appreciate the help.

So, hurrah for Kickstarter, and the option to Kickstart each other

Here’s my latest offering – feel free to kick, start, share, or just listen.

Believe In Peace by Steve Lawson

Two new videos and some photos from California.

2012-02-05T11:03:12Z

Am back from California now, after my busiest trip there ever. Had a great time at NAMM, and a whole lot of wonderful shows, that resulted in about 6 hours of new improvised music that needs mixing and editing for future release. Yay!

I’ll write a full round-up in the next couple of days, but for now, here are two videos that have appeared in the last couple of weeks.

The first is a live one from the All American Melodrama Theater in Long Beach – a gorgeous theatre that was booked for a show at the last minute, which I did with the lovely Muriel Anderson. This is a version of a A Year Afloat from 11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything:

The 2nd video is an interview with me about the freelance life, about creative freedom, balancing work/life and a load of other good stuff, from the lovely people at Kindred. Enjoy:

Two of the shows I did out there were with an incredible musician called Daniel Berkman. One of my favourite ever improvisation partners. The live recordings will be appearing soon enough, but for now, here are some photos, taken with my camera by the lovely Artemis Robison, who was the match-maker than brought Daniel and I together for the shows:

Also while I was away, the lovely Fiona Talkington played a track from Believe In Peace on Late Junction on BB Radio 3. It’s been my favourite radio show in the world for many, many years so to be played on it again after a few years away was a big thrill, and resulted in a quite a few new people finding the album, for which I’m most grateful. Fiona mentioned on the broadcast that she’ll be playing more tracks from it soon, so I’ll try and give you advance warning of that.

Going to NAMM? See You There…

2012-01-16T21:33:36Z

For those that don’t know, NAMM is the National Association Of Music Merchants – the American trade body for those who make and sell stuff-to-do-with-music-that-isn’t-recordings.

I’m back there this year, having missed the last two due to being busy being a dad. I’ve really missed it – having attended every year from 1999 – 2009, doing demos on behalf of the various companies whose equipment I was using at the time, finding out what’s new and catching up with the many amazing music-world friends that I only get to see once a year at NAMM or in California if I get to travel around afterwards.

So, anyway, if you’re going, it’d be great to meet up – feel free to send me a message. If we’re friends on Facebook, you can message me there, or tweet me, or email me or just keep an eye out for me around the MarkBass and Modulus booths.

See you there!