[Music] hi I'm Cody Hutchinson I'm a professional bassist in Calgary Alberta Canada I play upright and electric bass classically trained but play in jazz and all other styles of music you can see me on stages such as the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra playing the pop shows or with the Calgary Jazz Orchestra my tour and record with a number of Canadian jazz artists also happen to have a record label with about 80 albums out with my wife called cronograph records and finally I host a radio show on CKU a radio in Alberta called a time for jazz that's the life of a musician and I also go to a lot of junior highs in high schools and when I go into these schools I find quite often that the players are a bit adrift I know that young bass players start a bit later than the rest of their peers on their instrument one of the big things I noticed is they're missing that first lesson the lesson about technique about how everything works how to stand how to hold this all of that so that's what we're going to do today now normally it takes me about an hour to do this with a student so I'm gonna do the coals notes and try and get through this very quickly today and the good thing is with YouTube and video you can just screenshot it hold it whatever you need to pause and you can see what I am doing and go back and check things out so our goal today at the end of this lesson is I want you to be able to do the following [Music] now for those of you who are in bands you probably recognize the sound it's a b-flat major scale happens to be one of the most common things you're asked to do in concert band or jazz band if you're coming from a classical background don't worry this is one of the scales that you learn a little bit later for our concert jazz people it's probably the first scale that we need to look at to do that we're gonna have to go through four different things one we're gonna have to learn how to hold the bass and set it the right height - we're gonna have to learn how our left hand works on the instrument three we're gonna have to learn how our right hand works on the instrument and then finally we'll do the b-flat major scale number one how to hold the bass how to set it the right height now this is a thing that I say to people in schools and they go what do you mean the right height yes it adjusts it goes up and down as you see there's an end pin down there and what it does is it allows you to raise the bass up and down so I'm six foot two so I'm a bit taller a lot of bass players I run into are told the same thing which is set the bass with the nut just above or near the height of your eyebrows now that doesn't work you for your shorter I studied with the teacher who was five feet tall that won't work for her because she has to reach up very high even when the bass is all the way on the ground so what we actually do is we use this the bow which we'll talk a little bit but not too much today one thing about the bow even if you don't have a good bow grip is hold it in your hand even like you're badly this is not a bow grip by the way this is just I'm holding it badly to stretch out my arm as far as I can if my arm with the bow in it with a bad bow grip sits between the fingerboard and the bridge in the middle we're in the right spot now once I put an actual bow grip in [Music] then we're in the right spot so to set the height of the base pretty easy just tip the base down always put your left hand under the neck holding the body on the upper boat you tip the base down and then we get down here and we have our end pin and you'll notice there's a series of notches in most bases some are big some are small it doesn't matter if you see notches you're in luck so the pin here what you do is all you have to do is get it to go straight down into a knotch doesn't have to be something where it's very tight so I actually am on the last notch on this base so I just put it under where I feel the pin is screw it in wiggle it around and then okay it's not notice I didn't tighten it very much because I don't need to and the number of schools I go to were the bases the end pins are stripped don't do that what we want to do is make sure that it's just tight enough now the reason it might slip and strip as well is if you put your weight on the base try not to do that that just makes it a little harder on the instrument these things are very sensitive and as you can ask any person who sells them they're not the cheapest instruments in the band okay so that is how to set it the right height now to hold it think of every sport you've ever done stand with your feet shoulder width apart now once you do is you put your weight on your right leg and then you just turn your left leg out I know it sounds like the hokey-pokey it's not so you turn your left leg out and what you're doing is just trying to bend your knee a little bit then what you do is you bring the basin to you you never move to the base because you have to stand this way for quite a while you want to be as comfortable as you can what we do is we move the base and we tip it in to us we turn it into us two points of contact the upper bout is going to get my hip the lower about is going to turn into my knee so what you'll see is when you turn it it hits my leg so I just tip it in May voila what do I do no hands and this is really important so that you're not making it harder to do things over here [Music] we want to make sure that's not difficult to move in our left hand the more we're squeezing the more difficult things are so okay we've got all of that we've got the base tipped in you'll notice also it's angled towards me it's not standing straight up if it is danger see a lot of young students who have it the other way it'll fall and it'll break this way if I let my knee go it turns in if I let go somehow I slip it's gonna fall into me and my arms just do this we save the base so don't worry about it next thing we're going to talk about our left hand so if you play a electric bass and I play electric bass electric bass is one two three four an important thing about electric bass is you put your thumb in the middle of the neck in the middle of your finger if you're hearing this for the first time that's how you can get it so your hand is nice and flexible on the upright bass very similar what we do is we have our thumb in the middle of the neck and then behind our second finger at least now what that allows me to do is stretch my first finger out quite a bit further and so for those of you with smaller hands this is super helpful now electric bass like I said one two three four on the electric bass on the first four frets spread your hand out as wide as you can get to those four frets that's as wide as three frets on the upright bass so what we do is one two four three and four work together all right so that's really important and because the pinky is the weakest finger in the hand the more that our thumb is in the middle of our hand the more we're helping that helps us spread our fingers out also we have our fingers curled right so one two three four our fingers are curled our thumb is in behind our second finger next thing that's important is look at my elbow my elbow right now is up it's not down it's never resting on the base what we want to try and do is get our elbow up so that when we're playing we're pulling back a little bit it's kind of like archery right when you pull the archery you don't pull like this you pull like that I'm not really an archer so just believe me when I say it or don't believe me when I say it but anyway open the up great what we're doing is we're pulling back like archery and we're trying to make sure that our fingers are curled a bit and this way I don't have to squeeze so hard so the real thing is if I turn the bass too let's scream like this see my thumb in the background there's that b-flat major scale Ian now when I do this without my thumb that doesn't sound as good but I'm able by pulling back to actually make a note so that means I'm not really squeezing too hard and if you want to play quickly on the bass you don't want to squeeze very hard all right so there's our left hand 1 2 pour some in the middle elbow up number 3 our right hand now because I'm aiming this lesson at concert band jazz band students I'm going to avoid a little bit the right hand classical technique which what that is is more where we're plucking out for example with my boat so when I'm playing with a classical technique well it's got a little less character and why I'm doing that is so that I can sound more like the five or six different bass players in the orchestra section whereas when I'm playing on my own I want to have a little more character in my sound so I play with my right hand I put my thumb on the side of the fingerboard and what I do is I hit through the strings so imagine here I'm going to rest on this string here the second thickest string the a string then I'm going to pluck through I don't rest and pull I strike the string the reason we do that not rest pull is it takes a little time at the string to respond if I wait and pull you won't really notice it so much until you're playing with a group say for example a jazz line [Music] if I'm resting and pulling that might sit a little bit pine and it'll actually make the band drag if I strike I can actually play a little more up on top of me it allows me to play more in time with the band so if you ever have your band teacher someone saying hey why are you dragging that might be a big reason for it so we strike and you also notice I'm using almost two full joints of my finger on both my first and second finger I'm trying to get as much of the finger as I can to get a big sound first is an electric technique where I'm doing you can already hear it's much quieter now there are some world class of bass players who play this way but they've really worked on that technique to get a big sound this right off the bat you get a big sound thumb on the side you also notice I'm staying above the end of the fingerboard I don't go into the gap we stay up here but my arm is relaxed so there's my right hand now we could do a little quick this is the brief calls notes of the bow this is a French bow there are French and German bows German bows are underhand where basically you puts the bow in between your thumb and your first finger just bring it in there we go and we just use the way of arm and pull down I started on German Bo moved over to French because that's what my teacher played in the case of the French bow I will say it does take a little longer for your hand to get used to it but once you do it's great and you'll feel a bit of pain in your thumb for the first little while so what you do is think of it like you're picking up a shopping bag you just let your fingers curl a little bit then you rest the stick into the first joint of your fingers that's all it's doing now you'll notice on the bow this is a little hard to see but there's a bit of a gap this has got a rubber piece on that most people's don't have but this black part is the line and then we have the Frog here in between is usually a little bit of open piece of wood that's where our thumb goes so when I do this I clamp my thumb into that little open piece of wood and then my first finger fourth finger think of it like a teeter totter nice and spread out and all my fingers drop on my fingers are curled and I just let the bow pull I'm not using my arm muscle in math what I'm doing is I'm just letting the weight of my arm down and then waited my arm pushing up and that's really all it is is thinking it's like a pendulum right you are getting sleepy that type of thing that's what my arm is doing that's a really really brief Bo thing so I would suggest you go look at a bunch of lessons bowing is not the simplest thing to get started on so you want to do as much as you can so we have our left hand we have our right hand we have our standing let's play the B flat major scale so this is probably one of the first things that you need to do in concert managing your high of that type of thing and if you're not in none of those situations well this is still helpful as heck so this isn't what we call half position on the bass and I study what's known as samanda technique in most upright basses play semantics niek or start there it's one of the more well-known techniques came around I think in the late 1800s Early 1900s bass player named Frances Mandel who has a great book I would say if you doing the book try and do it with a teacher it'll be much more helpful and it won't be as part of my French boring and you need to have other things around the book to make it very useful for you but anyway all the techniques you've seen so far are in line with semantic technique I have my handout here where we would think we're our first fret is second fret third fret if you don't think frets that's fine semitones what we do is we go on to our strings which by the way if you don't know your string means here we go the big thick one e then we have above it a string then above that D and then G and they are all in line with the musical alphabet which is ABCD efg what goes up must come down so learn to save the alphabet as fast forwards and backwards so gif e d c ba you want to be able to say that think that can do that the scale so what we're going to do is we're going to put our first finger with our nice technique thumb in the middle of the neck middle of our hand we're going to put our first finger on the a string the second thickest string and we're gonna push our first finger down that's a B flat then what we do is one two four we put all four fingers down now you notice I don't do this I don't do this I don't do this when I'm playing I try and keep my hand nice and close to the strings B flat C or then we're going to play our open D string D now I'd probably keep my hand just hovering I'm not gonna remove it I'm gonna be flat C D and then e flat on one and then F on four and then open G an a on my second finger first and second go down and then finally b-flat on for so on for my fingers are down to try and make a good sound those all four fingers are down when I'm pressing on my pinky just to help it out it's a win here's the B flat major scale I'll say it as far as positions and then I'll save the notes one for open one for open two for four - oh and four one open for one now you notice I'm saying the pitch as I say this because one of the things is one we're playing you want to be able to hear the sound say the sound so that's what I'm doing then here we go B flat C D E flat F G a flat B flat a G F E flat B C B flat and there you go there's the B flat major scale so hopefully all these little techniques I said freeze frame check it out go back look at them but that's the gist of your first technique lesson on the double bass there's lots of different lessons online you can focus on each little part of this and take some time to get your hands working but if you put in some time and you like it you'll be able to do pretty much anything you want on the instrument thank you so much Academy for having me as part of this video series and making so we can talk about how to get going on the double bass I'm Cody hutchinson [Music] you [Music]