Rob's Bass Bulletin January 2017!
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Happy New Year Y'all!

Hi and welcome to Rob's Bass Bulletin for January 2017! This is my monthly-ish newsletter for anyone with an interest in bass, but if you're just getting too much email you can always use the link at the bottom and unsubscribe.

Last month we talked about blues, and how the 12 bar I - IV - V form is a defining characteristic of blues music. The other thing that makes blues sound the way it does is modality. Modality is one of 2 common ways to write harmony, and it focuses on using a mode, ( a scale or chord type ), as the harmonic raw material. ( The other way is tonality, which uses a set of notes as its raw material. The set of notes is called a 'key'. To hear tonality click here, notice how that doesn't sound like blues at all ).

To sound like blues, we can be modal with a dominant chord, a pentatonic scale, or a minor chord. In each case, the idea is transposed to different root notes rather than moved thru the notes of one key.

This month's 'Wish I Could play Like That' clip features one of the greatest blues bass players ever, Johnny Gayden. Johnny was the house bass player for Alligator Records and toured extensively with the legendary Albert Collins. Johnny's still out there and going strong, someone shot this clip of him playing live less than a week ago. Great tone, great technique, and a cool choice of licks - I wish I could play like that!

Hey, I have a few public dates coming up I'd like you to know about:

Trio Verde Plus will be at the Oskar Blues Brewery in North Austin Saturday Jan. 14th. We play from 6:30pm 'til 8:30. Oskar Blues has a great sound system, a spacious dance floor, and hey, it's a BREWERY!

Shakedown will be at Cafe Mueller Sunday Jan. 15th from noon 'til 3pm.

Shakedown's also playing the I 35 Baby A's Jan. 20th from 8pm 'til 11pm.

It would be great to see you at any of those shows, Happy New Year!

Rob.

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