Bass Week on MusicRadar
Where would popular music be without bass? It would certainly be a great deal less primal and groovy, that's for sure. Although often overshadowed by preening show ponies on lead vocals and guitar, the humble bassist is an essential ingredient in the rhythm section.
Lest we forget, it's rhythm that makes people want to get up and shake their asses in the first place. You sure as hell can't dance to an unaccompanied guitar solo. Not without an inadvisable level of chemical assistance, anyway.
In celebration of all things bass, from the spectral thump of Bill Black's upright in Heartbreak Hotel to the avant-garde jazz fusion of Jaco Pastorius and beyond, during Bass Week on MusicRadar we'll bring you a selection of features, interviews and tutorials with a heavy emphasis on life at the bottom end of the frequency spectrum.
Bookmark this page as we'll be adding great new content throughout the week. We've also collected some fantastic bass content from our archive that you might have missed the first time around. Click onwards to see the story so far...
The 25 greatest basslines of all time
We asked you to nominate your favourite basslines of all time in an effort to crown the greatest bass performance in history. With approximately 10,000 of you voting in our poll, we can now present the top 25 rundown in full.
Interview: Megadeth's Dave Ellefson on playing metal bass
"My philosophy on playing metal bass is simple," says Megadeth's low-end master, Dave Ellefson. "I try to be the mortar between the bricks that glues the building together. I know it might sound weird to base music on architecture, but the analogy really holds true. Without that strong glue, a building falls down. The same can be said for music."
Bass Legends: Jaco Pastorius
Ask any bass player to name his top 10 bassists and you'll find that Jaco Pastorius almost always features in the top three. Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion but whether devotees or not all players agree that Jaco was unique, with an extraordinary ability to make his basslines fluid and significant no matter what he was playing or who he was playing for...
Carol Kaye: my 10 greatest recordings of all time
For Carol Kaye, the most-recorded bassist in history, with upwards of 10,000 sessions to her credit, the very idea of picking the highlights of her career is daunting, to say the least...
Bass Legends: Motown session giant James Jamerson
At a time when The Beatles were headlining the British musical invasion of America perhaps the strongest response from across the pond came from the Motown label. Motown possessed the capability of producing hit after hit from its collection of artists and each recording featured a very tight rhythm section...
Interview: Dream Theater's John Myung talks bass
"Soft-spoken"..."shy"..."a man of few words"... for years, Dream Theater bass master John Myung has been described in such terms. But the musician who MusicRadar readers voted the Greatest Bassist Of All Time in 2010 is friendly, open and extremely talkative - a regular chatty Cathy almost - especially when it comes to all things four-string in nature. (Or in his case, six.)
Bass Legends: Queen's John Deacon
Freddie Mercury's recent would be 65th birthday cannot fail to bring Queen's bassist John Deacon to mind. Deacon is not only the first in our series of Bass Legend profiles to coincide with Bass Week on MusicRadar, but also the only player to have two entries in our greatest basslines of all time poll...
Interview: Carol Kaye - the Queen of Bass
Some folks have to pad their resumes, but in the case of Carol Kaye, who from the 1950s and into the 1970s was one of the busiest session musicians around, laying down distinctive bass and guitar tracks on scores of Top 10 smashes and literally thousands of recordings, even a bullet-point sampling of her accomplishments boggles the mind...
Cool and classic basses
As part of Bass Week on MusicRadar, we are kicking off a series of profiles of some of the most iconic instruments ever to grace stages and recording studios across the globe. And what better bass to begin with than the four-string that a certain moptopped Liverpudlian used to take the world by storm in the early 1960s...
Check out our profile of the Hofner 500/1 Violin Bass and much more here
The History Of The Electric Bass part one: Early Days
The early days of bass playing must have been a nightmare! Low resonance plus the need for audible volume meant huge instruments like the Mandobass (mandolin style) and the Regal Bassoguitar, which was a monster cross between an acoustic guitar and an upright bass...
12 essential live bass playing tips
We've all been caught out at gigs for some of the most stupid reasons. Assuming that you've arrived with all gear present here are a few suggestions to help prevent a gig from becoming memorable for all the wrong reasons...
The 25 greatest bassists of all time
The humble bass guitarist is an under-appreciated beast. Yet try to imagine the last six decades of popular music without James Jamerson, Paul McCartney, John Entwistle, Jaco Pastorious or John Paul Jones, to name but a few...
30 amazing unsung bassists (in no particular order)
There's nothing like a good poll to cause controversy. Bass players might often appear to be the quiet ones in bands, but voices were certainly raised when we published the results of our greatest bass players of all time poll. While winner John Myung's considerable chops are beyond question, arguments raged about the guys, some of them legends of the instrument, who didn't make the cut...
