I was out and about, and curious to if anyone else uses Velvet Garbos on their Czech Ease. Sometimes in my Internet searches, I inadvertently find videos of bassists with incredible talent, yet don’t get much exposure.
Maybe some of you have heard of her, but if you haven’t, she’s a talented young bassists to keep an eye on.
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Interesting article in the LA Times with some insight about being a musician. No matter what genre you specialize in, the lifestyle is similar. Unless you get into the top paying Los Angeles Philharmonic or the other 9 orchestras in the U.S. where you can make over $100,000, making ends meet is a juggling act. No one really goes into music for the money right? There are many easier ways to make money, but are there really many better ways to make money? You make the call.
BTW, statistics say that it’s easier for an athlete to get into the NBA than a musician to get into the top ten U.S. Orchestras. If you’ve got the talent, then kudos to you.
LA Phil = $127,140
Typical non-major symphony = $32,775
LA Opera = $28,000
An LA Opera musician humbly thinks that she has it good compared to “a lot of musicians”. That is an eye opener.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-ca-musicians-20101226,0,5967344.story?page=2
Outside the orchestra pit
For three L.A.-area classical players, life offstage illustrates the luxuries and complexities of making a living in music. Teaching, film work, even poker-playing all help pay the bills.
When the conductor’s baton comes to a halt and the instruments are tucked away, the lives of professional classical musicians continue past the clef notes of that night’s repertoire. For three L.A.-area musicians, life offstage illustrates the luxuries and complexities of making a living as an orchestra musician.
FOR THE RECORD: Classical musicians: In the Dec. 26 Arts & Books section, an article about making a living as a professional classical musician gave an incorrect last name for one of the subjects. She is Tina Chang Qu, not Tina Nguyen.
For Dana Hansen, 31, days off from playing are usually spent in a children’s gymnasium or a park, where she totes around her cherub-faced daughter, Phoebe — an entirely different kind of instrument.
As a full-time busy violist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it’s a luxury when Hansen find herself in a room full of toddlers, shuffling barefoot on a carpet as she sings “Ring Around the Rosy” or enjoying a moment of laughter with her 18-month-old daughter in the park.
With the birth of her first child, Hansen is still learning how to navigate her time between mastering notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and swing sets.
“It’s a hard career to go into,” she said. “A bunch of people my age in this field are struggling. I’m not complaining with where I’m at.”
Her full-time spot with a major orchestra allows her to lead a comfortable lifestyle in Pacific Palisades, where she and her husband, Noble Hansen, who works in finance, moved last year. The annual income for an L.A. Phil musician in 2008-09 was $127,140, according to the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians.
Hansen’s route to becoming a professional musician began with a degree in modern European history from Harvard College.
“I’m not naïve,” she said recently at her home. “Music was what I wanted to do. But it’s not exactly a sure thing. I wanted something else to fall back on just in case.”
She began violin studies at age 5 and viola at 15.
“I definitely want Phoebe to learn how to play an instrument,” she said. “I think it’s important. Look at her — she’s already formed a connection with music. Whenever she hears a tune she likes, she’s dancing.”
Paul Zibits, bass
Now bassist and personnel manager for the Pacific Symphony, Chicago native Paul Zibits, 59, has been an active studio musician since moving to California in 1979.
“I learned early on that music was what I was good at,” Zibits said. “I was lucky to be good enough to make a living with it.”
A father of two boys and husband to Kimiyo Takeya (a violinist in the Pacific Symphony), Zibits has seen his musical abilities extend beyond the stage and onto the big screen: He has performed on the scores of more than 500 motion pictures, including “Titanic,” “Spider-Man,” “Jurassic Park” and the first”Pirates of the Caribbean” film.
When he’s not performing onstage or in a movie theater (or tweeting as @pzibits) Zibits can be found at the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at Cal State Long Beach, where he teaches double bass.
For the few minutes (or hours) outside of that, he’s mastering his poker face.
The hands of professional bass player Paul Zibits are in a tight grip.
Tap, click, tap, click.
There are no music sheets around and that humming isn’t the sound of fingers plucking strings. The chorus comes courtesy of tapping chips at work during a game at one of the monthly poker nights Zibits hosts at his home in Long Beach.
Mastering music and mastering poker go hand in hand, he said.
“It’s all about technique. In music, you learn an instrument’s scales and positions. With poker, you become skilled at learning when to bet certain hands, when to raise hands, and your position at the table.”
In 1999, he outplayed 233 others to finish seventh in the World Series of Poker’s $2,500 buy-in, hold-’em tournament held at Binion’s Horseshoe in Las Vegas — pocketing nearly $15,000 for two days’ work. At this year’s tournament, he pocketed just over $3,000. Not bad, considering that section musicians with the Pacific Symphony would earn about $32,775 if they were to play every concert and rehearsal offered for a year, according to the orchestra’s site.
During off hours, Zibits often can be found among the herd at Commerce Casino — the “mecca of poker” as he refers to it — or Hawaiian Gardens Casino. In 2006, he became a published author and editor of the book “Poker Face 2.”
“Poker is fun … and it can be a great stress reliever,” Zibits said. “But it can be exhausting at times. Your mind is racing, constantly analyzing everything. It’s like playing a Mahler symphony. Sometimes you need a vacation from it.”
Tina Nguyen, violin
Juggling separate jobs is not unusual for some musicians. Many teach privately in their homes or perform with several orchestras and other ensembles. Others record for the motion picture industry.
It’s the kind of hectic lifestyle that Tina Nguyen, 35, is all too familiar with.
For Nguyen, playing violin for the Los Angeles Opera is not a full-time gig, so additional jobs are needed to supplement her income — especially as the opera seasons get shorter; she gets paid per performance. The approximate salary for a musician for L.A. Opera’s 2010-11 season is $28,000.
“This season has been rather difficult,” she said. “We reduced our season because of the economy. Most of us have to work on something else. Next year, it’s going to be pretty tough. Normally, we have about nine shows; now we’re down to five or six.”
Nguyen currently gives private violin lessons to three students.
“A lot of my colleagues teach more,” she said. “They might have like 10 or 15 students. For me, my goal is to have six. I don’t have much time to devote to it; I often have concerts on the weekends.”
And she does recording for film and TV series — the latest being ABC’s “No Ordinary Family” — and performs for other outlets, including the New West Symphony, where she’s an assistant concert master.
“A season like this, with tremendous reductions … it’s worrisome,” Nguyen said. “In this town, unless you’re in the L.A. Phil, you have to do other jobs to make it.”
Qu estimates that 70% of her income comes from her L.A. Opera performances.
“There are a lot of musicians in a much worse position,” she said. “Of course, I would like to have a more reliable full-time job. But this is where I’m at right now.”
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I don’t know if a bassist, especially an upright bassist, has ever been nominated for Best New Artist by the Grammy’s but for 2011, Esperanza Spalding is one of the nominees. Bright new talent is what we need and I’m very pleased that she’s been recognized.
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Wow it’s been a long time since the last post. I’ve been really busy juggling my schedule with a baby boy so the blog didn’t get the attention it deserved. Add that to the fact that he was born 8 weeks early so he needed a lot of attention to get him through that rough beginning.
The basses have collected a layer of dust and you have been seeing the same post since March. I”m now one less bass than before; the Italian and Prochownik Bow are gone (Neonatal Intensive Care at the hospital is $3000-5000 a day). Now after a long hiatus, it’s time to start getting my playing back up to speed and get this blog rolling again. There’s that God given gift that allows some bassists to be off from playing for a decade, yet one day he/she can just pick up the bass where one last left off like it was yesterday. A truly wonderful gift. I don’t have that gift. Nine MONTHS takes its toll on me. I do surprise myself on how much I retained, but I know that my fingers feel a less dexterous and my brain feel like it has cobwebs that need dusting out.
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I’ve had about one month to get to know the Acoustic Image Ten2Ex and compare it with the Coda+. For those of you who are not familiar with the Ten2Ex it’s the same cabinet as the Ten2, except that it does not have the amp head built in. I already own the Coda+ so it would not make sense for my application to buy another cabinet with the same head, especially since the newer AI amps have the “cabrio system”, which allows for easy docking and undocking of the head.
If you recall, the Coda+ comes with a single 10″, 5″ mid and a 1″ tweeter. The Ten2 cabinet consists of two 10″ speakers and a tweeter, no midrange speaker . The benefit of having two 10″ speakers is that the cabinet can move more air. More air movement equals more volume. Just like the Coda+, the Ten2 has a downfiring 10″, but instead of the 5″ midrange and tweeter mounted into the front, it has a 10″ in the front and a 2.5″ coaxial tweeter in front of the speaker. This makes the cabinet taller and heavier, yet it’s still much lighter than other brands of 2×10 speaker cabinets.
I love the Coda+ and how transparent and accurate it sounds, but it’s weakness is volume. It’s impressive for its size and weight, far louder than a polytone or GK and has way more headroom. It does have a hard time keeping up when the stage volume is up because of an aggressive drummer in more rock n roll oriented genres. I would say that 90% of the time, the Coda+ is plenty loud and that’s all that I need. I could have gotten a Contra+ to duplicate the same sound, but the idea of a 3×10 stack seemed like a better option for loud situations.
To test the Ten2 against the Coda+, I used the same head and went back and forth to hear differences between the speakers. The most obvious thing is that Ten2 is noticeably louder. It’s at least 50% louder at the same setting based on a rough guess. The next thing that is noticeable is that it does sound different than the Coda+. There is more bottom end on the Ten2 at all volume levels. At the upper half of volume settings the bottom sounds deeper, clearer and rounder than the Coda+. The lows are not boomy at all. The midrange frequencies on the Ten2 drop off, so it lacks the flat frequency response of the Coda+. Boosting the mids to match the levels with the lows only resulted in a midrange that sounded somewhat harsh, similar to a Polytone. The Ten2 sounds best with minimal equalizing. The high frequencies are clear and more audible than the mids, but their levels are also low compared to the lows frequencies. Unlike the Coda+, this cabinet is scooped in other-words, but it’s not colored like one would expect from bass guitar cabinets.
Out of curiosity, I dusted off the old ’72 Fender Deluxe Jazz to see how the Ten2 would sound. The Coda+ didn’t do so well making the bass sound good, but the Ten2 did much better. It still sounded a bit sterile and a bass guitar cabinet’s coloring would be very beneficial, but it’s still very usable unlike the Coda+. With some eq’ing, I could get a very decent sound out of the amp. With the bass guitar, the bottom on the Ten2 was tight and fill and the highs were clean.
It’s not to say that I don’t like the Ten2, but I like the Coda+ far more. For what I want to hear out of my amp, the flat response of the Coda+ with BassBalsereit Studio active pickup + AKG microphone does a exceptional job of making the amplifier indistinguishable from my bass. If the sound coming out of your pickup/mic jack is exactly how you like it, then the Coda+ is a clear winner in terms of quality of sound. If you’re going for volume because you routinely play where stage volumes are high, the Ten2 will get the job done while still providing clean, transparent sound. You will sacrifice some detail and accurancy, but at high volume levels and playing against other instruments, that loss wouldn’t be as perceivable.
The Coda+ stacked on the Ten2Ex was the best of both worlds. How the speakers are arranged makes a very large difference in the overall sound. With both speakers on the ground, the lows are very pronounced. Stacked, the sound is closer to flat level across the full spectrum. By stacking, one cabinet off of the floor and is decoupled from the floor which reduces its bass response. The lows are still more pronounced so a little equalizing is needed to get the response to flat. This arrangement is very loud for an upright bass amplification system and for one that weighs less than 50 pounds total.
Ideally it’s probably best to have both the Coda+ and Ten2Ex, but if you had to choose one amp, you should choose one based on what you do. If you do jazz combos, the Coda+ is a very clean, accurate amp with a lot of headroom and detail. If you routinely play where the stage volume is high, the Ten2 may be a better alternative.
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I was standing in the same room as my basses when I heard something give and then there was a loud bang. When I looked over my bass, I found that the composite tailpiece that I was going to write about had failed at the joint where the tailpiece wire goes.
I wasn’t overall thrilled about the composite tailpiece. Yes because it was very lightweight the bass seemed louder. I had my apprehension even before installing it anyhow. Tapping on the ebony tailpiece it had a nice woody sound, but with the composite tailpiece it was a thuddy sound, not unlike tapping on tupperware. The term “composite” in this instance, is really a fancy term for plastic.
I’m not at all impressed by the composite tail piece, except for the weight which did benefit my bass. There are better lightweight tailpieces made of maple which would seem the way to go.
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I’ve just put together a section on the site that addresses some of the common questions that beginners have about how to get started with the Upright Bass. It’s a work in progress, but the same questions come up daily so I posted it with the most commonly asked question to get it started.
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In my last post, I mentioned that I was a looking for a lightweight tailpiece and tried a composite one, which snapped and broke. Jonas over at the Double Bass Guide mentioned the cheap maple ones that come on lower end basses. That though had crossed my mind, but Jonas’ bringing it up reaffirmed that it wasn’t a crazy idea would be worth looking into. It does seem odd to put a $20 tailpiece on the $10,000 bass, but then again, it would be odd to spend $150+ to possibly get the same results if I’m looking for functionality. The high end maple tailpiece look fantastic and are well crafted, but that gets negated on the Old German bass that I use for Jazz where I have the two XLR jacks with integrated preamps from the BassBalsereit Aktiv and AKG Mic attached to the underside of the tailpiece.
I’ve put in the order for two of the Engelhardt Maple Tailpieces for $20 each from Jack’s Music Store to experiment with. If I like the results of a maple tailpiece, I’ll consider getting one of the Mike Pecanic Tailpieces or the BassSpa ones.
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I was standing in the same room as my basses when I heard something give and then there was a loud bang. When quickly glanced at each bass, I discovered that it was the Old German Bass with the composite tailpiece that I just installed a few days ago, which I was going to write about. Yup, broken in less than a week. I found that the composite tailpiece had failed at the joint where the tailgut goes. C’mon, they were strung with Animas so I wasn’t asking them to hold bridge suspension cable type strings. “Space Age Material”… riiiiight. I’m not going to try these again, because when something breaks like that, it sticks in the back of my mind even with a replacement. I definitely don’t want to wonder it the tailpiece is going to give again when I’m on the way to my next gig.
I’ve always been open minded to newer materials and advancements in materials that seem promising in improving on older pre-existing norms. Right when I received it, I was already questioning if these composite tailpieces are an improvement over wood tailpieces. I had my apprehension even before installing it anyhow, but it was more-so because it didn’t sound very good even in hand. Tapping on the ebony tailpiece it had a resonant sound, but with the composite tailpiece it sounded like plastic, because well …. essentially it is fancy plastic. Yes, because it was very lightweight the bass seemed louder and more open, but there was some loss in quality in the upper harmonics. The bass just didn’t sound as crisp. The lighter weight is welcomed, but plastic as a material just isn’t. I’m not sure that I can recommend that you switch from the common ebony tailpiece to a composite, such as a Wittner. The tailpiece gave up on me before I did on it so let’s just part our ways and move on.
Onto the next thing. I contacted both Mike Pecanic and Jake at the BassSpa in Vancouver because they both make tailpieces out of several types of woods so maybe I can have the best of both worlds, light and resonant.
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Seems that there are a lot of newbies that know to ask for Spirocores, but don’t know why. I still love Spirocores, even though I’ve moved away from them in recent year.
I’ve been a long time Thomastik Spirocore user when it came to strings for most jazz work. These are considered THE STANDARD, for jazz players, and have been for decades. A vast number of jazz bassists as well as known names such as Ray Brown, Dave Holland, and Christian McBride use Spirocores. If you are a jazz bassist, at some point you’d have used Spirocores. They are bright, loud and have a ringing that people associate with a bass sound in jazz. There are many reasons to love them. They aren’t expensive, they sound good on almost any bass, they don’t get washed out by other instruments in ensembles, they are durable; among other reasons. You’ll hear complaints about the G string being to twangy, the set being too high in tension, or some other complaints; remember it’s not a perfect string but it’s a highly regarded and respected string.
We at Thomastik have created a revolutionary orchestral jazz bass string.
Spirocores were not designed with the intent of making the best Jazz string; their intention was to create a better orchestral string. Some bassist would say that it was fate or divine intervention that Thomastik-Infeld created an orchestral string that worked so well for Jazz; a string that jazz bassists still highly regard and love to this day. It is not as if Thomastik surveyed jazz bassists and set out to design a string based on that criteria, the truth was that Thomastik created a new line of strings which Jazz bassists ended up liking and gravitated towards because it had characteristics that worked great for jazz.
How I Ended Up Wanting Spirocores
As most young bassists, I started out with a pretty lousy plywood bass for several years before college. What strings the bass came with were the ones that you played. You were lucky to have matching strings, and even luckier if yours had Spirocores, but you were clueless that it was a Spirocore since the local music store was clueless in identifying bass strings. Actually it was a curse because you’d spend years hoping to find that great sounding string via happenstance that you didn’t know was a Spirocore. Gut strings?… No one ever brought them up. If you were savvy enough to ask for a gut string, you’d either get a response that no one uses gut anymore and/or find out that gut strings cost more than what your bass was worth. Gut was the boogieman, we’ve heard about it, but never seen it and we were to forget that we heard about it. So we spent years getting very familiar with steel strings.
When you broke a string and had the money to replace that one string (what kid had the money to get a whole set?), you went and asked for a bass string. They’d point at the various packages on the wall, until you clarified that you need a double bass string. At that point they’d dig in their drawer and try to find are replacement for the string that you broke. After displacing dozens of violin strings, voila! “oh oops, this is an A you need a D”… voila! they get you your shiny new string. You might get whatever brand they happen to have in that drawer. It might be a Spirocore by chance, but it usually was some cheap string such as Super Sensitive or the like. Most of the time you’d end up with some other orchestral string until …. one day you were handed the string that looked like the one that you remembered sounding so good with the words “Spirocore …Thomastik-Infeld”
Parting Ways in College
Things between me and the Spirocores were good until college and the bass curriculum required technically difficult orchestral pieces in addition to jazz. At this point, I started learning about the existence of other brands and types of strings, ones that bowed a lot easier. I bounced back and forth between the Flexocores which were great in orchestral and the Helicore Hybrids: the-worst-of -both-worlds orchestra and jazz string, but they worked for both. After college I couldn’t get a hold of a second bass fast enough so that I could have a dedicated jazz upright bass with Spirocores.
Other companies have tried to create strings that “improve” on what people like about the Spirocores, but most players seem to inevitably return to the Spirocores. I’ve moved away from steel core strings, so they no longer are on my basses, but I still recommend them to beginners who want to play mostly pizz because you can’t go wrong with them. Competitors of Thomastik have tried to improve on the Spirocore with their own steel core “jazz string” and have failed to upstage them, because it’s hard to beat the tried and true set of Spirocores.
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