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I like the baseline this week Mark Stoermer's bass playing is something I have always enjoyed.

When writing baselines I love when the baseline has melodic parts that are supported by more simple parts. This is largely the kind of baselines I like to write

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I didn't get any videos this week of me playing the things in this lesson; this was largely because I don't see myself using any of the techniques for my own playing.

I do admire funk music and love to play it, but I think my style as a bassist I don't really want to use many funk tevchniques.

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We worked on playing with a plectrum this lesson, I didn't include any videos of me practicing the exercises used in the lesson because I am already comfortable playing with a pic.

I used to believe I would never enjoy playing with a pic and only thought finger-style and slap were the only real ways to play the bass.

The more I have learned about pic techniques the more I have gained a respect and understanding for it, I think for my sound, I would interchange playing with a plectrum as it produces a tone that is hard to replicate.

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I really like the direction we decided to take this weeks track into. I often forget when playing how important letting the track breathe is, it would be good of me to learn to leave more space when playing and lean into playing the rests in a song.

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Since Ben wasn't in for this lesson, everything we had practiced a few days prior was off the table so we ended up just needing to play the track as is.

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The baseline for this song is not technically difficult at all but it did give me the chance to do what I was talking about last week in regards to playing the rests and learning the importance of a more minimal baseline that's is used to support the other instruments and the singer.

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This week we looked at more advanced slap techniques and looked at bassists like Mark King, Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten. This technique in the video is something we looked at from Mark King. It stuck out to me and I can definitely see myself using it in the future.

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This week, we looked at 16th notes at varying BPM. As a l tend to write baselines with a lot of 16th notes, I found this lesson very useful practice.

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I believe I managed to work with the backing track well and I played the part with accuracy.

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Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, I had to miss the lessons this week and travel home

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My main goal for this term is to appreciate gaps and let my baselines that I write support the other instruments that are playing and save overcomplicating things for when it is more suitable.

S-I would like to leave more rests in my writing, not to fill my part with 16th notes

M-I will be able to see the evidence if I have achieved this in the projects I am working on outside of uni.

A- I know it is attainable as I used to leave more gaps when I started writing baselines, but as I grew and learned more as a bassist, I felt the need to overcomplicate my playing, all I need to do now is find a balance between the two.

R-It is relevant to my sound and my course as it directly relates to my style as a bassist

T-I will give myself this term to start seeing progress.

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This term, I plan on listening to these bassists music in order to see what elements I can utilise in my own playing.

-Jermaine Jackson, he is the bassist that I grew up listening to and that first got me interested in playing, I think I would find it useful to go back and see if there are any things I could now use in my own baselines.

-Ed Nash, I have always loved Bombay Bicycle Club's bouncy and interesting baselines.

-Duff McKagan, these baselines highlight quite well what I want to achieve for myself as there is a great mix of tasteful complexity as well as well timed simplicity

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This baseline is another simple one that I've not needed to spend as much time learning. I like the idea of writing a song around a strong riff and using it as a motif throughout the song.

It'll be interesting to see how it fits into the brief of the week, which is acoustic livelounge.

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This week, I caught the end half of the blues lesson, the week prior, they had covered the 12 bar blues which I am already familiar with and don't plan to use in my playing. This week, however, we covered soloing, which is something I definitely wanted to be more comfortable doing.

This lesson refreshed for me the types of scales to use over what different chord progressions.

In this lesson I completed an 8 bar blues solo that I was very happy with.

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So far, I know I wanna do a cover of Ready for Something by The Amazons, if I can, I would like to play bass and sing on this one as it relates to what I want my use to be.

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I would like to become more comfortable soloing

S- I would like to be able to complete an 8 bar solo in any key comfortably

M-I will be able to measure this by seeing if I can complete a solo that I am happy with

A-I believe it is achievable as I know the steps I am going to need to take in order to become more comfortable. I am going to need to re-familiarise myself with the main scale shapes. The main thing I think I am going to need to do in order to achieve this is simply by practicing.

R-I believe it is relevant as in the future, when I am playing on other peoples songs, or even writing for myself, I will want to be comfortable knowing that if the time arises for me to take a solo; I can do it, confidently.

T- I would like to be able to do this by the end of the term

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In this lesson, we covered raking.

I do plan on using this skill in my playing in the future as it enables me to play with clearer articulation of faster notes.

This lesson was a good refresher for me to keep an eye on my right hand techniques while playing.

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I am really happy with this weeks performance as I believe the line I wrote for it suited the vibe of the performance well, there was a lot of space but I managed to get a lot of movement across the neck and hold a nice amount of tension and resolution in my part (particularly the chorus and bridge)

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This weeks song has a very complicated baseline with loads of room for improvisation.

technically speaking, it is a complicated song where knowledge of the structure is important.

This is the type of baseline that I love, lots of space at parts that can leave room for great dynamic moments but also lots of complicated lines that fill the space wonderfully. This might be slightly too pushed for my taste in terms of how full the baseline gets at parts but I think it will be a great tool to help push my playing ass a player.

I want to spend extra care on the long and intricate runs (like the unison line and the bug run in the final chorus) as I have had trouble with articulation when I have been faced with similar parts in other songs.

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This week we mostly talked about mapping out walking baselines.

This was useful as it showed an easy and fast way to come up with a baseline to any song; however, I don't believe ill use it that often as the type of music I want to play and how I want to sound as a bass player, docent include walking baselines.

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This week we covered the modes.

I found this lesson very useful and I would like to start using modes in my playing in order to give my baselines more interesting sounds as well as helping me out when it comes to soloing.

I this lesson, I realised that I knew more about modes that I initially thought and that I need to stop acting scared of them and start using them in my playing.

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I am still happy with the cover, I think that Ready For Something by The Amazons would be a good fit as it showcases the strong riff motif that I have been writing about in my case study that I like so much as well as leaving some space in the verses for the vocals to come through and not be muddied up. As we get closer to the summative, Ill probably put my own spin on this line and make it more my own.

In addition to this, I have been songwriting a lot with Luqa recently and we think we are going to use on elf the originals for the coursework as it would show exactly how we both play as musicians and show what our styles and influences are more clearly.

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By the start of next term I want to be able to be better at applying my theory knowledge into my playing. I too often rely on my ear to tell me what to play and don't use much theory knowledge when it comes to writing parts or improvising.

In order to improve this skill, I will practice along to backing tracks and only let myself improvise/play within a certain scale or mode. By restricting the notes I can use, will encourage my creativity and also expand my knowledge and comfortability with certain scales.

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We didn't spend much time on the song or theme of the week since we found out that most of us weren't going to the performance lesson.

Instead we decided to play a mashup of a bunch of different songs in the same key.

This helped me to work on my improvising skills and my ability to lock in with the drummer and change the style of my playing to fit everything else that the other musicians were doing.

I wish I got a video of this as it is a great example of me meeting my goal of being able to restrain my playing and embellish to support the other musical elements going on around me.

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From this week on, I aim to practice for around an hour everyday for at least the next month. I have three different setlist that I need to learn for the end of the month and I believe a good way for me to start working through the sings I need to learn will be to set aside an hour a day to sit and learn/ practice the songs.

I am hoping that once this becomes a part of my daily routine, I will want to carry on with my daily practice after this month and branch out to practicing techniques and scales instead

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Me and Luqa decided to finalise our group for who we want to play for our summative performance of In My Mind. We reached out to Scotty, who has agreed to play drums and Jack Keane, who has agreed to sing and play rhythm guitar.

Jack has said that he thinks the song will be out of his range so if he can't do lead hell still be up for doing bv's.

In order to decide who will do the lead vocal: me, Luqa and Jack will take it in turns singing and decide who it fits best.

Since I have been writing in my case study how I would like to front a band while playing bass, this could be a good opportunity to give this another go, as it would have been sone time since I would have fronted for a song.

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In these coming weeks I have a lot of gigs that I will be playing for other people as well as subbing in for a band.

The band I will be subbing in for (Trip Hazard), a few of their songs would need me to play with a pic, as I am a mainly finger style bassist, I don't tend to practice with a plectrum and one of the songs they are going to cover (Destroya MCR) has a pretty fast pace chugging. The first time I played this through, I realised that my technique and stamina is not where I would like it to be so this week I will add it to my practice routine to do some pic exercises.

For my sound, I would like to be as versatile as I can and be able to use a pic to get that specific tone in my playing and in order to be fully comfortable playing with one, I need to improve my technique and stamina.

I need to be able to play destroya successfully and in full time by next Wednesday (as that is when the gig is)

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The genre of this week and next is rock: we spent this lesson covering plectrum technique and the different ways to play with a pic.

This was very useful as I am already trying to improve my pic technique for my sound as a musician. The styles I liked before this lesson were rhythm and alternate style.

After this lesson I learned that there is a place for all the styles depending on the baseline I am playing. Even if it doesn't feel the most natural to start with I should assess the bassline and decide what technique would be the most efficient.

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This song is a very simple bassline that needs to be played with a pic. It is mostly root notes with a couple of embellishments swell as a synchronised riff with the guitar.

The main thing I like about this weeks track is the tone of the bass, the fact to is in drop D and played with a pic gives the bass a huge sound that I really want to experiment with more and see if I can achieve it with the small amp at the alphabet venue.

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I like the funky and busy bass line to this song, it was a lot of fun to learn. This is very similar sort of style that I would like to play, I plan on adapting the bass line to be more my own style to make it easier for me to pick up since I won't have time to learn it properly with me being so busy with other peoples events.

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My group decided to take this song in an interesting direction, the singers decided to take the lead for this week and propose the idea of us doing a dance/techno version of the song. This is not my style at all so I decided to adapt the bass line like I had always planned and see how it sounded with the changes they made.

In the end I think it ended up being pretty good as it made it so there were some links back to the original and it maintained the funkiness that lives in the chorus.

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-I would like to learn the set for the last group that I am helping for their event, it is a 9 song set of covers. I believe I can do this next week as they are all simple covers that don't require much skill to play.

-I would like to learn the covers for Jack Keane's set swell as run through the whole set to double check I am okay with all the songs as it has been a while since we have looked at them.

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This week we looked at arranging a time that we are all free in order to have at least one rehearsal before the final thing to make sure there are no major issues.

We have all agreed to look at the track separately and learn it in our own time and we will put the pieces together when we are all in the same room

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Here's a clip from the gig I did with Jack Keane, this is his song Weather Man, which I wrote the baseline to. For this song I thought that a line that followed the main melody would fit in very nicely.

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Song 1- I am fully set on having In my Mind as one of my performance songs as I believe it embodies the whole reason I like the amazons as a band, I love their strong fat sounding riffs combined with their more pulled back verses. Dynamically I really love the way The Amazons write their music. I will also be able to do backing vocals on this track which is good for my sound as I want singing to be a part of my usp. We did have to change drummers since Scotty didn't have the availability that we needed so instead we are using Zuke.

Song 2- For my second summative song submission I will be using a song I have written the part to: I'm Not Ready, which is a song I do with Jack Keane. This song covers the other half of the bass playing I like which is more busy baselines sat neatly underneath the other instruments. I am also doing backing vocals on this track.

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This week was the first time we were able to meet up to practice this song, to say it was our first try, I would like to think we did a good job.

Some things we want to work on for next time:

-Timing in the verses, I am not happy with how the placement of my notes sound in the verses, I am going to do some more active listening to remedy this

-Solo tone, we all agreed there was a bit too much reverb on Luqa's solo tone and he is going to spend some time perfecting the tone

-Stabs, there is supposed to be more stabs before the final riff that we keep leaving out

-Coming back into the vocals after the solo, me and Jack are still working on the timing of this and will work on it separately, and hopefully it will have improved next time

We would like to try to book in another practice before our performance next Thursday.

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I decided t include this song as it has an interesting pentatonic run around a minute into the video. When learning this song, this part peaked my interest as I would like to include more runs like this in my playing as it is a simple yet effective tool to spice up a bass line.

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We really managed to tighten things up in this rehearsal and I am confident that the performance this week will go very well. there was still a few issues that needed attention at the start of this rehearsal and by the end, I believe we managed to sort everything out.

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Here is one of the earlier practice videos of I'm not ready.

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The main issue that we still had with the song was the guitar tones, but we realised that it was largely due to the amps that were available for this practice and that at the final performance, we would be able to have everything fixed.