Maintenance...

When I bought the acoustic bass a couple months ago I thought that there was a little bitty rattle right around the Ab on the G string. But on the other hand I hadn’t played one of these in 28 years so I wasn’t exactly sure. But I kept playing the bass and it kept not going away. It would come and go a little with humidity changes but last week was really rainy and I noticed it a bit more. Honestly I thought it might just be the brass plate that holds the tuners maybe slightly loose.

Besides that, I had new Spirocore strings on it that I’ve been playing for a couple months and I installed a Realist pickup on it which entailed loosening 3 of the 4 strings. With all of these little changes plus the buzz, I called ahead and asked Robertson Violins if they would do a 2-month checkup for me to check the angle of the bridge, make sure the sound post was OK and tell me whether I was hallucinating that little buzz near the Ab. They agreed and I loaded the bass into my old pickup truck and took it down the road to Albuquerque.

I got lunch¹ and came back and still had a little time to kill so after asking politely they let me roam around unsupervised in what I think of as the Room Of Bass.

I’m guessing there is a couple million dollars worth of inventory in that room alone so it was a nice sign of trust. I played a funky old Belgian bass that I liked but honestly I am certain that the bass I bought is the best bass for me.

The sound of my bass reminds me of the 1880s bass that I sold in 1996 but this one hasn’t been cracked and repaired and busted and fixed over and over like that one was. The lore says that an instrument that is played develops a voice of its own over time. Mine is only ten years old and it already throbs and jumps and I think it’s going to sound even better into the future.

And it turned out that there WAS a slight irregularity in the ebony fingerboard that was causing my little buzz AND it happened to coincide with a natural “wolf tone” that is just part of the instrument. (I had known roughly what a wolf tone was but I did not know until now that basses tend to get them at around the Ab. So it was a bit of reinforcement behind the unpleasant buzz.)

The buzz is fixed now. Here a bit of Straight No Chaser (in the key of F the way Miles intended, sorry all you Bb Monk fans but SNC is better in F) that leans on my newly-fixed Ab with no buzz.

I’m always looking around for distinctive bass lines. I remembered that I used to play Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night In Tunisia a lot and I started getting that back under my fingers. The Eb7 in the intro has to be played up the neck but I’m dithering over whether to play the Dm business in first position with a shift up to Eb7, or to really evolve the strength and precision I need to play it up close to the Eb7. I’m practicing both ways. I have a similar dilemma with the Monk tune In Walked Bud, whether to shift for the notes on the walk down or play them up the neck with no shift. As I recall, I used to always favor the position shift because it ultimately saved my left hand strength during long sets, but now I have the luxury of time to practice getting it right without shifting left hand position.

Finally, I’ve been playing down the Keith Jarrett tune ‘Long As You Know You’re Living Yours. Technically it’s not that tough but the form is 8 bars then 10 bars then 11 bars then repeat. This rearranges my head in a good way. It’s a chance to work on taste over technique, but I’m still not where I want to be as far as precise fingering, even on a tune that isn’t all the technically challenging. Also the jam sections over F in the front and A in the middle are fun. I’ve been throwing The Beatles Come Together into the middle part just for the heck of it, it works surprisingly well.

Don’t make your move too soon…

1  Despite living in and around the Four Corners for for twenty years I had never had a Blake’s Lotaburger with the green chile. I almost never eat fast food but it was decent!