Next Level Bassist Teaching and Inspiration

Harvie S
The Fundamentals of a Bass Player
Harvie S is an
award winning
bassist, educator,
composer, arranger,
and producer.
I
have been teaching for a long time. I started teaching at the
Manhattan School of Music in 1984, and I had previously taught
extensively with a private studio and through workshops. I have
improved as I’ve been teaching, and my teaching has improved as well.
Quite truthfully, the process of teaching has taught me a great deal.
It is a very difficult thing to teach the bass, and it’s taken a lot of
thought and soul-searching to figure out how I could make myself
a worthwhile source of information.
I started on the piano, and didn’t play the bass until I was 18.
Everything in my life was geared toward playing and performing.
In fact, I had no aspirations to become a teacher. My true love is
certainly getting out with other musicians and playing - I won’t say any
differently! Teaching came as people who heard me performing started
to ask me to teach them. I used to feel taken aback, and I wasn’t that
excited about it. People would come over for lessons, and my teaching
was very scattered - I think I helped in some ways, but not nearly as
much as I can today.
It was a wakeup call for me when students would ask questions that I
had never considered before. My default answer at the start was “I just
do it!” I never had a bass teacher, I taught myself and figured out what
I needed. When a student would come at me with questions, I had to
analyze and codify all the things I was doing and be able to verbalize
them. Up to the point where I started to teach, I worked on things
with little inward questioning. Once I started to figure out what I was
doing, I think I started playing on a higher level. There a tremendous
benefit to teaching, because the more I taught, the better I played and
the better I taught. I found teaching to be naturally parallel to playing.
The combination feeds off itself. One of the reasons for enjoying
teaching is I feel I’ve learned more than I taught! Teaching is about
making life a better place to be, and it makes me happy when I find it
appearing in other parts of my life.
Establishing a baseline for the bass line
I approach teaching on many levels. The first thing I do is watch
a student and analyze what they do - not only the notes they play,
but their posture, their left and right hands, their technique. Beyond
that, I analyze their bass lines and we can begin figuring out how their
playing can help a band sound better. Knowing all of the rules, and
knowing how to break those rules, makes you a great bass player.
Honestly, I think being a great bass player is not as easy as some
people like to say. It’s not about playing this or that scale, or approaching
the root from a certain note - those things aren’t it. Are these
things completely wrong? Of course not! This seems to me like saying
all a great basketball player does is dribble and shoot - I don’t think
that’s the case.
To me, there’s a whole science of playing the bass, and it’s quite
involved. Truthfully, I love it, I love talking about it, and I love helping
people discover this. When I work with a young player and show
them the things they need for those light-bulb moments, it’s enjoyable.
I have a set of basic fundamentals that I teach to all my students, but
I approach every person I work with as an individual. The bass differs
from other instruments because we don’t simply think differently,
but the bass and the person playing it make a unique combination
SPRING 2014 NEXT LEVEL BASSIST
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