I published my video to go along with my arrangement and recording of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” played in the awesome style of the vocal group The Drifters.
This is a ukulele and string bass duet on White Christmas while thinking of all of our men and women in uniform serving America so far away from home. See the Music Store to buy this song.
I’ve always loved the version done by The Drifters after I heard a clip of it on Home Alone when Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) realized his family woke up late and rushed off to the airport on their Christmas vacation without him. So, with just a little internet research I discovered this had been a big hit for The Drifters for many years.
As I have been studying double bass for the last few years I was intrigued to see if I could create an arrangement of White Christmas that prominently features the bass in the style of Bill Pinkney, the bass singer in The Drifters. After getting into it for a while I needed to find something for the 1st tenor part that Clyde McPhatter sang and I settled upon the fun, humble ukulele (or ‘ukulele as the Hawaiians say….).
I have wanted to post a lesson about some simple melodies that you can play on the double bass so I decided to just post something that interests me. And at the moment I am into the late Gary Moore….an incredible blues-rock guitarist. I absolutely love Gary’s performance of Parisienne Walkways. The intro to Parisienne Walkways contains the hook and while at first due to the passion with which Gary plays it appears complicated or difficult, by analyzing it you discover that it is actually quite simple.
The song’s tonality is Am and begins with three downward glissandos of A, E (from the octave on the A and E strings) and C (on the E string). The melody begins on E or the 5th of the Am scale and descends to F or the 6th (two steps below the root A) and then repeats the pattern by returning to the E above the root briefly but begins the downward series of notes by dropping one step and starting on D and going down to E below the root. It repeats this pattern until it lands on C below the root A and finishes as it started with the three downward glissandos of A, E and C before going into singing the first verse.
After the three glissandos at the beginning, start playing with your 4th finger at E on the G string.
The basic melody written out in bass clef is show below.
I can never seem to remember all of the scale modes, so since teaching something seems to be the best way to learn I decided to create a musical scale modes chart to help drive this home.
Per Wikipedia, “The modern Western modes consist of seven scales related to the familiar major and minor keys.
Although the names of the modern modes are Greek and some have names used in ancient Greek theory for some of the harmoniai, the names of the modern modes are conventional and do not indicate a link between them and ancient Greek theory, and they do not present the sequences of intervals found even in the diatonic genus of the Greek octave species sharing the same name.
Modern Western modes use the same set of notes as the major scale, in the same order, but starting from one of its seven degrees in turn as a “tonic”, and so present a different sequence of whole and half steps. The interval sequence of the major scale being T-T-s-T-T-T-s, where “s” means a semitone (half step) and “T” means a whole tone (whole step), it is thus possible to generate the following scales:”
This is lesson DB-15 Music Reading Basics, aka Real, Real, Basic Music Theory, and is a continuation of my journal of things I have learned as an adult double bass student.
See the video for a few pointers about the rudiments of reading music.
The illustration below shows how the various values of notes and rests discussed in the video relate to one another. If you want, click here to download the PDF.
Getting used to practicing with a metronome is really important. It will help improve your rhythmic abilities and improve your consistency of playing at a given tempo. And the more you practice with a metronome, you will find that you start hearing a metronome in your head at other times. You just become more tuned in to timing issues.
Make sure you can HEAR the metronome clearly when you are practicing. Either put it as close to you as possible, or connect it’s output to your amp or headphones, if you are practicing through headphones.
Be sure to get a metronome that is digital or allows you to change the tempo in very small increments. The Korg MA1BL Visual Beat Counting Metronome – Blue available on Amazon.com is a very good one.
If you don’t have one like this there are many metronome apps out there (“There’s an App for that!”) that work on the iPhone or other smartphone. If you have a smart phone you should have no trouble finding a metronome app. One that I use is the “Pro Metronome” by EUM available on the iTunes store.
By the way, the metronome measures tempo by beats per minute (BPM), therefore 1 click per second = 60 BPM.
