Hi it's Geoff Chalmers here from discoverdoublebass.com
we have an online school really there's a whole bunch of courses and lessons
that will help you with your bass playing from a range of different tutors
covering all sorts of different topics so if you want to play the double bass
if you play the double bass and you want to want to learn something new please go
and check that out and today I'm joined by one of the tutors who I'm a big fan
of his playing and we are going to be discussing something that I've heard him
doing on some recent recording sessions that I want to know more about and
that's playing percussion on the double bass so first of all welcome Olivier
it's fantastic to have you here today thanks Geoff well we've been filming all
week a series of lessons about improvising and one of the things that I
noticed Olivier doing was he was using quite a lot of percussive elements as in
actually playing percussion on the double bass as part of your wealth your
is your voice on the instrument really it was really integrated with your
playing all these different cool percussive things going on so I was
hoping you could kind of speak a little bit about how you approach it and maybe
give us a bit of a demonstration as well so yeah what are your thoughts Olivier
yeah what's really important to me is to imitate other instrument and the bass
I'm really interested in a lot of percussive style and I actually watch a lot of
conga lessons and Cajon do you play drums a little bit yeah yeah I have drum
at home I play a little bit of percussion so I'm really interested but
I'm really more interested in applying it to the bass so for instance if I if I
if I hear a Cajon rhythm I I'll try to find you know the
different place on the instrument where where it sounds
yes I just experimenting with that and and trying to adapt some other things
that that I see on other instruments on the bass it kind of looks like you're
sort of hunting down the different sounds from the instrument as well are
they all in different places on different basses it depends yeah it
depends a lot on basses this one has a really nice bass sound here your bass is
really cool here generally but it's a little far to be really usable with the
other hand but here
so you're doing palm hits for the bass yeah that's that's the Cajon
that's really a Cajon technique and I've got two and four or sometimes yeah that
is yeah different different I love some great players conga players
Giovanni Hildago you've got a Cajon a great great Cajon player from Spain El Piraña
yeah I love experimenting and of course all the great drummers we
basically have a little drum set here we can't have access to everything but it's
quite it's quite interesting to experiment with it the real sudden
challenge after adapting it to the double bass is to is to actually play
with it we have a lesson about that in the course but playing the bass and at
the same time playing percussion is another challenge because of technique
aspects but as well of musical aspects but it's really it's really a great
journey could you maybe play something where you're combining some making a
bass playing with percussion I'm putting you on the spot here that maybe a riff or a line
love that Olivier it's a really it's a really unique sound and I think it opens
up a lot of different possibilities especially because you've got all of
these you know I've heard you do this in a swing context i've heard you do this
it over you know Latin grooves and yeah it could really it could really take
your playing in a lot of different directions so yeah thanks so much for
joining me today thank you everybody for watching this was just a quick video to
kind of share with you Olivier's approach but if you want to learn more
from him we've got a whole series of lessons and there's two full-length
courses over at discoverdoublebass.com