hi it's Geoff Chalmers here from discoverdoublebass.com we have a whole
range of lessons and courses that teach you to play the double bass
our tutors cover different styles and genres and you can find out all about
them over at discoverdoublebass.com and today i'm joined by our classical
specialist Jason Heath so Jason thanks for joining me today
Geoff it's an honour it's been so fun this week so great working with you and
everybody here and i have just had a great time oh well we've
absolutely loved having you we've created some great material and it's
been a real joy to watch you teach and to chat and
get excited about the double bass and we've been looking at um or discussing
quite a lot about some of the things that hold people back
you can get fixated on and i think the one thing that pretty much every bass
player has struggled with at some point is intonation
you know and playing with great tuning uh and really reliable intonation and
this is a theme that comes up again and again in
the course so i was hoping maybe you could give us a few tips to help us
play more in tune and get some nicer sounds out of that instrument
yeah and i mean we could chat for hours about this it's definitely something
that i have to work on every single day i
think every fitness isn't it yeah it's like a level of fitness and strength
that you have yeah it is it's something that you just
have to constantly be on guard for and thinking about and
it's not just me it's not just bass players the great cellist Pablo Casals
uh back in the early 20th century he used to talk about how every day
he had to he started on his open c string and he played
c he put his first finger down for d and then he'd have to find the e
it wasn't quite in tune so every day and he's one of the most uh
well-respected musicians of all time uh he had to find the e every day so it's
not it's not just us but i i there are some
concepts that i think are really helpful for developing consistent intonation
and my good friend Kate Jones who teaches suzuki bass in the dallas area
i was watching her teach a whole group of young bass players and she was using
some words that really resonated with me and she talked about this
as being a wooden bell and i love the idea of the bass being a wooden bell and
she was playing this note right here a and she was
having the students listen to the vibration of the bass we'd
call it sympathetic vibration just the vibration of the instrument
and it's amazing how the bass itself will tell you if you're in tune or out
i'm pretty in tune let's go a little out of tune
you can hear it's like it's sort of got this like
it doesn't have that quite of you can hear that
ring and especially on a on d you can hear your bass ring
so just listening and feeling for those sympathetic vibrations is huge now we
also have so many tuning aids just within the bass itself
we have four open strings we can use those uh with a lot of notes
to check our intonation so if i'm on the note a
here i can check it so many different ways i can play open d
and a together
and i'm learning how it feels not only how it sounds which is critical but how
it feels our bass produces such a large amount of
vibration that we can actually feel it with our body
uh actually a wonderful bassist from Puerto Rico Hector Tirado
is deaf and he plays bass he plays recitals because he can just
hear the pitches by feeling them through proprioception
it's amazing so use that sense to feel if you're in tune or not
and and in addition to the open strings we have all these harmonics
and down here we can check
we can check to see if we're in tune and finally i spend a good portion of every
practice session with a drone on and by that i mean i
have an electronic tuner and if i'm playing in the key of g i'll
put a g on or maybe even a d the fifth and i'll
just spend some time playing through my music with a d
drone or a g drone and really making sure that
everything i'm playing lines up i listen to how those intervals sound and i just
have to spend time every day doing that and once everything
lines up and the tension kind of releases then you get that
resonance and you really feel it feels different doesn't it there's no
tightness and to the sound it's very open
yeah and i think it's a great thing to be aware of so
Jason thanks so much for sharing that it's been really helpful and if you want
to learn more from jason we have a whole series of lessons and
courses plus you can check out his uh podcast contrabass conversations i'm
sure you've probably heard it already but if you haven't make sure you go and
check out the links below thanks for joining us
and we will see you all next time