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Deep to Deep — October 2013 Report

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Three bassists jamming together

Steve (with Les and Tim)

There was much bass playing today at Hasbury Christian Fellowship, which hosted a Deep to Deep gathering. It was a fairly small scale event this time, with just Tim, Steve, Les and myself (and a short visit from Kev in the afternoon) but it was an interesting day. So interesting, in fact, that I almost forgot to take any photos! Fortunately I remembered towards the end of the afternoon and so managed to grab a few shots (click the image above to see the full set of, er, eight).

None of us was completely new to the event so we didn’t need to do introductions but did spend some time catching up. We also talked a lot about gear, about bass playing and about music in general. Apparently you get an interesting effect when two tubas produce a low drone deliberately slightly out of tune with each other and other far ranging topics of discussion.

For practical sessions, as well as jamming around on some worship songs, I had prepared some short pieces of music from the Taizé community which we projected on the screen. We draw on this material a lot at my church but I wanted to use it to experiment playing with simple overlapping parts to build up a more complex piece. I used lilypond to create scores in PDF format and also, because I was feeling merciful, to write in the notes under the stave for those less confident with sight reading. Mercy is good, because I had made a couple of mistakes so had to dive back in, correct them and produce a fresh copy! I also talked a bit about my recent ukulele playing (an easy way for a bassist to add a new instrument to their arsenal) and we also talked about how to deal with hymns without getting flustered by the indication of chords that change every beat (play the bassline or use your ear to figure out how many of those chords are really just passing notes that can be thrown away).

It was a good day and particular thanks to Tim for hosting us; not our first visit to the church but our first time in their new church building.

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