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Curriculum Details for Beyond Bass Camp
On the blog post announcing Beyond Bass Camp, Kevin posted a very pertinent question relating to syllabus/curriculum. So here’s an outline of the kind of approach I’ll be taking. As with everything I teach, much of the content will remain fluid and be based on the needs and personalities of the musicians who attend… Having…
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Sneak preview: B*B*C advert in Bass Guitar Magazine.
I got an email yesterday from the editor of Bass Guitar Magazine, wanting to do a news piece on Beyond Bass Camp. Hurrah! It’s great having magazine editors on your mailing list 🙂
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Beyond Bass Camp… Booking Now Open!
OK, you’ll see that there’s a new page up here, the B*B*C FAQ – and in it you’ll find the details about dates, times and cost for the 1st iteration of the Beyond Bass Camp. For the first 3 weeks – up until May 19th – booking will only be open to people wanting to…
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“Is It Right?” vs “Is It Good?”
The question in the title is one that is so often ignored and yet is fundamental to the process of learning music (and a lot of other things!) Because so much that happens in music education is based on a model established for teaching classical repertoire, the emphasis is hugely on “Is It Right?” –…
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Britain’s Got Talent.. and A Fetish For Celebrity.
For a week or so now, it seems like everyone has been talking about Susan Boyle. She’s a 40-something year old woman from lowland Scotland, who went on Britain’s Got Talent – the latest Simon Cowell vehicle – and ‘wowed’ everyone with her unexpectedly amazing voice.
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Why Settle For More and Miss the Best?
The title of this post is taken from a book by American futurist and Christian writer , Tom Sine. The thrust of his book is that by chasing ‘stuff’ – bigger/better/faster/more – we end up missing the magic in life, that which we were born to do. As musicians, the parallels are many – I…
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Music as if Culture Mattered
I asked a question the other day on Twitter, whether or not people thought that music education (in Britain specifically, but Twitter has no national boundaries) was complicit in peddling the myths of fame and superstardom, in collusion with ‘Big Music’ (a few people asked what ‘Big Music‘ meant – I used it in the…
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The idea behind ‘Beyond Bass Camp’
The idea for BBC came out of the masterclasses I teach in Northern California every January. For years I’ve been doing a day long workshop on bass, varying the focus slightly each time to cover different aspects of what we do as bassists and musicians, but all with the aim of helping musicians unlock their…