This week’s updates could take quite awhile to wade through all at once. Here are some highlights.
Entrepreneurial Arts
I recently got hooked on mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen‘s blog which focuses on new music, business, and singing. One of the things she has done for the past three Februaries is a post-a-day that is about improving oneself for doing music–musically, financially, health, the works.
I went through all three years and listed them out, gaving a few minor translation thoughts if you were to apply these ideas to the upright bass–not that you’d need much and of course links to the original posts which often include a bunch of excellent additional resources.
Three years worth of career and business advice for musicians all on one page. Enjoy!
How do you mic a double bass?
I’ve been doing a bunch of my own tests on double bass recording techniques and will eventually write something about that. But as a prelude, I made a quick tutorial on different mic techniques for dealing with bowed double bass.
There are images and, in some instances, audio. Try these out on your own recordings and see what works best for you.
Maintaining tone color as you ascend the neck
This week I posted a video lesson featuring Geth Griffeth, the MacGyver of the Double Bass, that talks about moving the sounding point of the bow.
Listening to new and newish music for double bass
I found a recording of Edicson Ruiz performing Kontrabass-Notenheft by Rudolf Kelterborn, which Ruiz performed recently in a recital in Switzerland.
Gennady Krutikov and Tatiana Porshneva take on the Glière Suite as well.
Recitals and performances
A relatively quiet week for bass performances, in addition to the Ruiz recital mentioned above, Samuel Rice gave Koussevitsky a turn over lunch in London.
As always let me know when your recital is going down so I can publish it here.