The Three Pillars of My Musicianship
This feels like a great way to end an era of the podcast.
We’re moving this weekend, the studio is being packed up, and this is the final time I’m sitting down in front of the camera here before everything moves to the new house and a completely new studio.
It felt appropriate that this episode ended up being about something pretty fundamental: the three pillars that have underpinned almost everything I’ve done as a musician for the past 30 years.
But I only really started thinking about them this way quite recently.
While signing and packing copies of How to Transcribe this week, I noticed how many people had bought it alongside Bass Player’s Guide to Sight Reading. Sitting next to those was The Bassist’s Book of Scales and Arpeggios, and suddenly this very obvious connection appeared.
Technique. Reading. Transcription.
Those three things have been with me throughout my entire career.
Technique
Scales, arpeggios, harmony, theory and the physical facility to actually execute the ideas I hear.
I’m not practicing technique because I simply want to play fast. Even after more than 30 years of playing, there are still enormous areas of my technique and musicianship I want to improve that have nothing to do with speed or trying to impress anyone.
Reading
Reading gives me faster access to music.
And despite having done it professionally for decades, it’s not some innate ability that appeared fully formed when I pick up the bass. It’s a skill I’ve worked incredibly hard on and one I still have to maintain.
So for this episode I decided to test it.
I pulled out two exercises from Bass Player’s Guide to Sight Reading that I haven’t played in years, spun up the play-alongs and took a shot at reading them cold while I was filming.
I also break down what’s actually going through my head while I’m reading: scanning ahead, anticipating fingerings, deciding where on the instrument to play something, thinking about tone, remembering mistakes that might need fixing after the take and — hopefully — getting comfortable enough with the notes that I can stop thinking exclusively about reading and start thinking about music.
Transcription
This might be the deepest pillar of all.
Almost all of the vocabulary you hear when I play comes from decades of listening, transcribing, absorbing and repeating music.
Transcription isn’t just about writing somebody else’s solo on a piece of paper. It’s about immersion. It’s how I’ve learned languages within music, developed vocabulary and continually found new inspiration.
It’s also probably the pillar I’ve neglected the most recently, and one I want to spend more time with again.
The Work Never Ends
One of the things I love most about the greatest musicians I’ve been fortunate enough to know is that none of them seem to think they’ve arrived.
The people whose playing seems almost impossibly developed still have lists of things they want to practice, sounds they want to explore and areas of their musicianship they want to improve.
Those lists make up several lifetimes worth of work, and the common thread I’ve noticed among so many of my musical heroes isn’t simply their ability.
They love the work.
In This Episode
* The three pillars that have shaped my musicianship
* Why technique isn’t about simply playing faster
* What reading music actually gives you
* Why sight-reading is a skill I still actively maintain
* Attempting to sight-read my own exercises years after writing them
* Testing myself on a piece in 7/4
* What I’m thinking about during a professional reading session
* Why one or two takes matter in the studio
* Thinking about sound and phrasing while reading
* How transcription develops musical vocabulary
* What I want to work on next
* Why great musicians never run out of things to practice
* Why loving the work might be the most important part of all
The Complete Bass Mastery Bundle
I’ve also bundled the three books that inspired this episode together for the first time:
The Bassist’s Book of Scales and ArpeggiosBass Player’s Guide to Sight ReadingHow to Transcribe
Together, they represent these three different but interconnected areas of musicianship: technique, reading and transcription.
Each book also includes its accompanying video masterclasses and play-along materials, so this is really much closer to a complete course than simply a collection of three ebooks.
And with that, it’s goodbye to this studio.
Thank you to everyone who has watched and listened to the podcast from this room for the past two years. The next time you see me, hopefully within the next week or two, it’ll be from the new space.
More soon,
Janek
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