Buckwalter: Director of... Orchestras?

It may seem improbable, but that's my new job title. That's right: your saxophone-playing, never-been-in-an-orchestra, grooved-out correspondent is going to be an orchestra teacher. Who would make such a strange decision, you ask? It turns out these people would. And which orchestras are they? That would be these. (I've given myself the assignment of updating the website over the summer to reflect who the new sheriff in town actually is.) It's an exciting opportunity for me, and I'm really up for the challenge of teaching a bunch of students something I don't know much about.

And a quick note to any of you aspiring teachers out there: it took exactly nineteen days for me to get a job out here. Just something to think about.

I'm off to learn about composers of grade 4 and 5 high school strings music!

You Shall Know Them by Their Bass

In response to The Mayor's gracious request, here is my bass and its best friend in the world, my amp. The bass is a Fullerton Ventura 4, featuring active electronics and, as you can see from the picture, a MM+J pickup configuration. Check it out.


The amp is a dinky little Peavey Max 126. It puts out ten whole watts of power, which is really all I need. The neat thing about this little amp is that it's got a vintage compression switch, which lets me switch from a clean-sounding, more modern sound to a more compressed-sounding tube-ish vintage sound. And the amount of vintage tube-ish compression can be controlled with a separate dial. For a little amp, it's pretty sweet.

The bass is lots of fun, but if I get particularly serious about being a bass guy, some things will have to change. My only complaint about the bass as it is right now is that the pickups don't treat all the strings equally. That is, the E A and D strings all sound one way, and the G string (heh, heh) sounds another way, almost more acoustic than amplified. My instinct and some research leads me to believe that this is due to the pickups in the bass being sort of cheap, so I'm kicking around the idea of putting some different pickups in. G$ seems very satisfied with his Bartolinis, and I hear good things about Nordstrand pickups too. We'll just have to see.

But there you go. There's my bass. And with it, I can rock you like a mountain.

All Strung Out

With student teaching over and summer employment yet to begin, I've had lots of time to practice playing my new bass. At the suggestion of many of my dear friends -- G$ chief among them -- I picked up some light-gauge strings at a going-out-of-business sale a few days ago, and threw them on. I don't know much about bass strings, so I bought the only set of lights that the store still had in a four-string set, and they turned out to be these. I'm not sure what kind of strings my cheapo bass came with, but man, what a difference these new ones made.

First off, the sound is a lot brighter. Associates and internet resources tell me that some of that brightness will go away as the strings get broken in, but I think a lot of the brightness will stick around. Along with being more bright, the sustain is much more pronounced. You might even say that you could go out and get a sandwich... and then come back and they'd still be going "wah."

Secondly, these strings cause much more of a sympathetic vibration in each other which, because I am lazy/no good at muting the strings I'm not playing, add all sorts of interesting overtones to the notes that I am playing.

I have to say, I didn't really like the new strings at first, but after an hour or so of playing with the settings on my amp and messing with the onboard preamp knobs, I think I have something pretty cool. Next up in the string experiment will be some sort of flatwound string... possibly from Fender or DR (once they come out with their flats). The neat thing about playing bass for me so far is that messing around with the instrument itself to get different sounds is MUCH cheaper than trying to do the same thing on saxophone. Reeds don't make all that much of a difference (in my experience), and good mouthpieces are so outrageously priced most of the time that you can't just try one out to see if you like it. And I don't even want to talk about pad/resonator/key-height voodoo. I don't understand those things, and I don't have an extra $800 sitting around to find out.

Bass is fun. Everybody should get one. Right now.