Last month I had a small tour with Des mots sur mesure VI. Érick, the sound guy, is someone I’ve worked with a fair amount, both before and after my switch to fifths, and I trust his ears – I’ve always had good sound with him. At the end of the tour we spoke about how mixing a double bass tuned in fifths is different.

In most styles of music, the bass (electric or upright) and the kick drum are playing roughly the same thing, and usually they’re mixed so that the bass provides the attack and the pitch, and the kick drum provides the resonance (jazz is different, because the two instruments play different roles). What this means is that the bass is usually EQ’d in a way that the low and low-mid frequencies are rolled off a bit.

Well, Érick found that with my bass in fifths, there was more than enough pitch and resonance, so he switched the roles. He EQ’d the kick drum to provide more attack (rolling off the low and low mids), while my bass was flat except for rolling off the 60dB range a little bit. He was a big fan of my new sound!

Wow, I’m really not good at keeping up this blog. As a recap for the new fingerboard, it’s settled in nicely, and it feels and sounds great.

But I want to talk about what I’m into at the moment: tuning in fifths.

I changed to fifths almost two months ago, now. My last gig in 2016 was December 14, and I changed my strings on the 15th. I didn’t have any gigs on upright until early February, so I had almost 6 weeks to practise and get the new tuning under my fingers. It’s been quite a process!

Here are a few of my impressions so far:

The bass resonates WAY better! It also rings out more, which causes the bass to cut through when I’m playing with a band. The notes I play are clearer and more focused, and I can hear myself better when I’m playing with a band, so it’s easier to play in tune.

Learning repertoire has been a lot easier than expected (which is quite a relief, since I have a lot of gigs in February). Obviously, the larger range opens up a lot of new possibilities, which leads to minor re-arranging of my bass parts, but that’s no big deal.

Generally, what used to be difficult on the bass is now easier, but what used to be easy is now more difficult. This is not just for intervals, but also for lines and licks.

The most difficult part about the new tuning is improvising. I’m still thinking about way too many things to be able to just let go and play the changes. But at the same time, I’m getting a glimpse of a whole world of new vocabulary that wasn’t possible on a bass tuned in fourths, which is exciting!

I’ll be giving a short presentation on my journey in fifths at the Montreal Upright Bass Day, which is coming up soon. I can’t wait!

 

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This really deserves it’s own blog post, but I’ll just stick it here: I recently got a new endpin system, designed by Mario Lamarre. It’s amazing. I’m still figuring it out, but it’s made a huge difference in my comfort level while standing and playing.

It’s amazing how much my bass has changed in just one day. It was apparent as soon as I started to play today: the sound is much more open, and even throughout the registers. I also fiddled with the action, since it had risen overnight, so the bass is feeling pretty good now.

My bass is definitely brighter, though, maybe a bit too bright. We’ll see if it mellows out over time, I might have to change strings again if it doesn’t. But everything is really full and clear sounding, and the bass is louder than before, which is cool.

This is a pretty interesting process!

It’s been ten months since my last post, and, well, a lot has happened. But I want to tell you about something really exciting: I got a new fingerboard on my bass!

The Background

I’ve had tendonitis in my wrists since January 2008 due to a workplace injury, and of course it affected my playing. To complicate matters, my fingerboard became warped due to the extreme fluctuations in humidity and temperature in Montreal. Also, I’ve been getting busier and busier playing music, which has a few important implications when it comes to my tendonitis: I don’t get time to practise anymore, which leads to weaker muscles, which in turn leads to the creation of bad habits while playing; and my tendons don’t get enough time to heal in between the gigs and rehearsals. And of course, everything spirals into a Catch-22 scenario: I can’t stop working because I need to make money to pay rent, but working makes the tendonitis worse.

A new fingerboard for a bass is expensive ($1500), and raising that kind of money on a musician’s income while also paying off debt is difficult. But I finally managed it. Mario Lamarre does all the work on my bass. He’s not cheap, but his work is amazing, and he’s a great human being.

The Test Drive

While at the luthier I played the bass a little bit and it sounded good, but it’s always hard to tell how an instrument sounds until you get it into a familiar space. So when I got home I played it a bit more, and was surprised at how big and full the sound was – but I still wasn’t able to really spend any time with it. So this evening I practised (I actually practised!), and really tried to pay attention to the difference in the sound. The results were interesting! Here’s what I noticed:

The notes really ring. It’s not resonance I’m talking about, though. It’s been over a month since my bass had been played last, and I definitely noticed that the instrument wasn’t resonating the way it does when it’s played regularly, but that didn’t bother me. A couple days of long tones and it will be sounding great again. But this ringing, I don’t really know how to describe it. I guess it’s partly sustain, partly brightness due to the new fingerboard?

However, there’s a tightness to the sound, and not in a good way. Again, I don’t think it’s the resonance of the instrument (or lack thereof) that I’m hearing. Various registers sound different – I mostly noticed this tightness on the A and E strings, as well as in the high register (previously, my bass had sounded quite even in all registers). I’d say this was most apparent when playing with the bow, although the high register tightness was obvious while plucking as well.

My left hand feels great! The action is now way lower, so it’s easier to play, and less tiring. This is exactly what I needed. Because the new fingerboard is quite a bit thicker than my old one, the whole neck feels bigger, but it’s not uncomfortable at all.

My right hand will need time to adjust. The action at the bottom of the fingerboard (where I pluck the strings) is way higher than before, so my right hand needs to work a little harder. I’ll just need to practise some technique, and I should be fine soon enough.

Conclusion

The new fingerboard sounds great overall, but I can’t wait till the bass opens up again to hear the full potential. Also, because the bass feels and sounds like a new instrument, I’m excited to play it and become (re)acquainted with it!

We made it!!! We managed to raise $5,130, which is approximately 103% of my goal.

Thank you, all you wonderful people who contributed to my campaign! This means a lot to me, I’ll be forever grateful.

The album is almost finished being mixed, and it will be mastered at the end of the month. The artwork and design is underway, and it looks great, I’m really excited about the direction it’s headed! The physical album will be pressed at the beginning of May, to be released mid-May, just in time for an album launch mini-tour, hopefully in a city near you. I’ll be in contact soon regarding delivery of the CDs and perks.

Here are the tour dates:

May 15: Burdock Music Hall, Toronto

May 16: Silence, Guelph

May 29: Café Resonance, Montreal

May 30: Raw Sugar, Ottawa.

Sincerely,

Joel

Greetings from Atlanta, GA!! I’m here playing with Jump Babylon at the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival! We played a school show this morning, and tonight we are playing the festival opening night concert at a very cool venue called Steve’s Live Music. It’s a little tough to keep up with work for my ongoing Indiegogo campaign while I’m on the road, so I’m happy I managed to get a few hours to work on this post.

I met Dominic Gobeil at McGill, we did our Master’s degrees at the same time. I had just moved to Montreal from Vancouver, and Dom had just moved from Quebec City. About a month into school, I got a gig from the booking office for a trio with sax, guitar and bass. I didn’t really know anyone outside the program yet, so of course I asked Dom to play the gig, along with Patrick Lampron on tenor sax (whose website seems to be out-of-date: here’s his CD Baby page instead). At the time my French was very rusty and Dom’s English was very weak, so conversations were a challenge, but we made it work.

Ever since then, we played together quite a lot, collaborating on many projects. Dom played on my first album, the Joel Kerr Quintet, along with Jared Greeve on trumpet, Patrick Lampron on tenor sax, and Eric Thibodeau on drums. I played on Dom’s first album, DG4, which was the same band minus Jared (and is part of my Joel Kerr Complete Works Indiegogo perk!). And we both played on Patrick’s album.

A large number of our class at McGill got together and formed a composers ensemble, called the M-Theory Collective. The band went through a few members, but in addition to Dom and me, it included Mireille Boily on vocals (who is also singing on my upcoming album!), Jared and Bryson Barnes on trumpet, Jason Stillman on alto sax, Patrick on tenor, Alex Côté and then Philippe Côté on bari sax (no relation – that I know of), Etienne Lebel on trombone, Marie-Claire Durand on piano, and Kevin Warren and then Dan Garmon on drums. It was a great group, very creative. I miss that band – it’s still a dream project for me to somehow record all the stuff I wrote for that ensemble.

In the summer of 2012, Dom, Patrick, Eric and I, along with Craig Pedersen, put together a week-long tour of Quebec and Ontario, culminating in a magical performance along the St-Lawrence River in Les Escoumins. There is a festival called On Jazz sous le lune, the concerts are in the Saguenay-St-Lawrence Marine Park, and the stage is right on the river – so while we played, the moon was setting over the river, and beluga whales were swimming around behind us. We recorded ourselves live the next day back in Montreal with Paul Johnston engineering, and the result is the album Live in Silence (which is part of the Joel Kerr Discography Indiegogo perk).

As you might imagine, when you work on composition and original material for this amount of time with someone, you can’t help but be influenced by them in some way. Dom and I both are influenced a lot by classical music and various modern compositional techniques, and knowing how much output he had was always good motivation for me to compose more.

After a long stretch of not playing together, I played with Dom and Eric on Coco Jazz (CKVL 100.1 FM in Montreal), and it felt great – hopefully it will happen more!