Busy Week

Since last Tuesday, I have played a gig or rehearsal every single night and it doesn't stop until next Mon. That's two straight weeks. I'm running myself ragged here...

Did a recording session Sunday at Blue Universe for Ray Chang. It was Ray, Issac Lang on drums, Darryl Voss on vibes and me on electric. My chops aren't good enough to throw down in the studio on upright yet.

Real mellow jazz, like Ray likes it. We recorded 4 of Rays originals and 1 Cover.
Pretty stoked on my bass solos. I think they all came out pretty good.

Audio coming soon

Great Show

Sabroso opened for Sambada last night, and it was a smokin hot evening!

The band sounded great, everyone pretty much kicked ass. No one made any major mistakes, intonation was great, good times. I did have a little problem with the upright feeding back due to the massive subwoofers under the stage at Downtown Brew. Kip (the sound man AND the guy who runs the building I rent my rehearsal space) is my homey so he did the best he could and rode the faders. Everyone said the bass sounded huge and good.

Dave absolutely KILLED it on the timbales. I asked him about that cause he tends to blow licks at rehearsals, and his response was to the effect of, "Hey, that's in rehearsal. This is live, it's time to do it right!" What a pro.

Sambada is a great band. Afro-Brazilian funk. Everyone in that band can really dance. They all trade instruments throughout the course of the show too, which I thought was cool.

I don't normally dance much, but I pretty much danced all night long with some lovely people. Good times.

Upright (s)kills

I played pretty okay last night. And that's a good thing. Sometimes I don't know why I play this big bass.

The Double Bass is the proper name. It's also referred to as the Upright Bass, the Dog House, the String Bass, the Standup Bass, The Bass Fiddle, the list goes on.

But no matter what you call it, it is by far the sexiest instrument ever invented. It has that great sound when plucked (called pizzicato) and that silky sound when bowed (called arco). No other instrument sounds that good in the low frequencies. And it's got those great curves!

It's very cumbersome due to it's large size. It's taller than I am! That makes it difficult to carry around, put in my car, set up in small areas, etc.

It's also extremely difficult to play. I can play some cool and fast chops on my electric bass, which is around 20 times easier to play, but not on the Upright Bass. It's as if I had to learn how to play an entirely new instrument. It's an uphill battle for me. Having received my Bass and started playing it this last summer, I haven't had enough time spent on it to even get comfortable yet. Which is frustrating, because I want to play all this stuff I know from the electric bass, but I can't do it!

So with all these factors against me, I sometimes wonder why I bother. It's a total labor of love. It's not practical, it is occasionally physically painful to play, it is extremely difficult, the pickup technology hasn't developed very well yet so it's hard to get a good sound out of an amplifier.

I guess it's all worth it when I play jazz on a bandstand. It really sounds better than the electric bass at jazz gigs. It sure looks better. And every now and then, after struggling and hacking my way through a jazz set, some one will walk up and say, 'Oh, I just Loooove the big bass!'. It's like they didn't hear me sucking, they were just enamored with the struggle of getting sound out of it in the first place.

And I think it's times like that where I remember why I play the damn thing. Because it IS a great instrument. And because I felt the same way about it as that person did for so long.

And because it looks cool.

Fist real Salsa gig goes well. The people danced the night away....

Amongst grey clouds and talk of rain, we went ahead and setup for an outdoor gig last night.

Sabroso played our first gig with two more on the books this month. Man, when this band is hittin, it hits hard. And of course, for the level of difficulty of this music and for it being our first live show, there were problems. And it always seems that everyone I know who shows up to see us play always see the disaster songs and leave. That ALWAYS happens.
But we had our moments.

So I worked at the music store from 10am - 5:30, then straight to the gig. Finished around 8:20, hung out for a while, went to Linneas 'Jazz Jam' night and jumped in for a song before heading home.

It was then that I realized why my playing was sub-par this evening. 2 reasons:

1) I didn't eat since lunch.

2) All the salsa and jazz I've been playing in the last 2 months have been almost exclusively on upright bass. Due to weather concerns I played electric tonight, which screwed up everything for me.

and 420 and music don't work together.

Dissapointment.

So an hour before the show tonight, Joe Duran, the bass player, calls in sick. Great. I've been practicing drums all week. And he has the stomach flu.

If it wasn't Joe, a good friend of mine and a bass player who plays circles around me, I would be super-ultra-uber pissed. But I suck it up and end up playing bass tonight for a bunch of songs that I don't know with chromatic chord changes. Great.

Aside from the dozen or so on-stage train wrecks I had a good time.

Whatever.

I was so looking foreword to playing drums.

Bad, Bass, Bad!

Remember all those entries about how good I think I play?

Well it was bound to happen.

I normally go down to the studio after work and practice for a while. It's almost a nessecity when playing the upright bass. That instrument is NOT like riding a bike. If you don't play it for a week, all is lost. Especially when you are (relatively) new to the instrument.

So this week I practiced drums instead. Why? Because I have a gig tomorrow night playing drums in a mediocre funk band. I absolutely love playing the drums. I tell people it was my first instrument, cause I would bang on anything around that produced a tone as a child before I had any guitars around.

So, being all excited about playing drums saturday night, I've spent all my practice time on the kit. Well guess what? I sucked ass on the upright bass tonight at my regular Friday Jazz gig.

And I played worse than I have in a long, long, long time. It was so frustrating. I could tell everyone else in the band was noticing.

Funny part was I took a few solos that came off well and got good response. But those were only good because I played as hard as I could out of pure anger at my crappy playing. Weird how that works.

Lame. Tomorrow should be fun though.....