John Hendow

Last night I had my first official bass lesson. It took some research and calling around to find a teacher, but I am quite satisfied with my first lesson, and this seems like it will be a good fit for my needs. We spent an hour playing through some material and talking about my objectives. My teacher was well prepared and had put together some material for me to work on, including scale / arpeggio exercises and an accompaniment CD to practice against.

In terms of mechanical diagnostics, I was pleasantly surprised that my right and left hand techniques were deemed pretty decent. Thus far I have been using the same basic right hand techniques that I learned while studying classical guitar; in terms of finger style, this is the “rest stroke” and the “free stroke”. For thumb techniques I use a fairly standard approach that I derived from observation of Victor Wooten, Les Claypool, Larry Graham, and Booty Collins. I had more confidence in my left hand, since my guitar technique is more directly transferable to bass. One of my challenges on fretless will be to develop accurate muscle memory for finger position.

The real challenge in working on bass is determining the direction I’d like to go. Without a doubt, I’m interested in studying the styles of Tony Levin, Mick Karn, Bill Laswell and Bootsy Collins. These are the players who are most directly responsible for my interest in playing bass. In the process of analyzing these greats, I’ll probably explore some related artists. Beyond that, I am interested in developing sufficient chops that I could confidently sit in on jazz gigs. Good heavens… I’m thinking I want to be a jazz bassist… it’s just a matter of time before I get a beret and start smoking a pipe.