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For the stories behind the best albums and the bands that produced them...
PROG
ASTOUNDING SOUNDS AMAZING MUSIC has it covered.
"We were never the same band again" How Rush redefined themselves with Moving Pictures
How they came of age with Nursery Cryme
PETRUCCI Reunites with Mike Portnoy on new sole album
AYREON
Dutch proggers release their craziest concept album ever
J c c andy Jackson, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1956, doesn't have the usual bass-player biography. A fusion bassist from his twenties, having got his start with the French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, he found fame with the AOR giants Journey in 1986. This kickstarted a long and prolific session career, whether playing pop hits with artists such as Whitney Houston or complex jazz with Billy Cobham, and he soon expanded his role to production, artist management, and then A&R, where he was a stalwart for many years at Columbia and MCA.
That's a successful music-industry career by anyone's standards, but Jackson's appearances as a judge and artist mentor on American Idol on Fox from 2002 until 2014 made him nothing less than a household name. Now that TV talent shows of this nature have receded from view a little, it's easy to forget just how massive they were a decade ago: At its peak, say from 2004 to 2010, American Idol was ranked at the top of the annual US television ratings. It created dozens of new musical stars, the best-known among them being Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, R
Stadium-rock perennials Journey are back with a new album made with the returning Randy Jackson, whose story goes far beyond merely playing bass. An A&R man, unwilling TV star, producer, and entrepreneur, Jackson is renowned in our world for his vast resume of sessions—but to 40 million TV viewers, he's better known as the man who sat next to Simon Cowell on American Idol.
Interview: Joel Mclver Photography: Getty and Queen's Adam Lambert, mentored by Jackson and his fellow judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Keith Urban, Jennifer Lopez, and others.
Many a musician despises the American Idol format, though-and to his credit, when Jackson talks to us today about Journey's new album Freedom, he paints a balanced picture of the show. And if you're looking for bass stories that will blow your mind, look no further: This man has seen and done it all.
I really enjoyed Freedom, Randy. There's tons of cool bass all over it. Thanks, man. It was fun. It was a little bit challenging to make during the pandemic, but we did it. I worked at NRG Studios in North Hollywood for part of it, and at my own studio here. It was wild at times, not being in the same room. Jonathan [Cain, keyboards] was in Florida and Arnel [Pineda, vocals] was in Manila, but we did it.
It doesn't sound any different to a traditional, studio-recorded album to me. That's because we know each other so well, and we've played together a lot over the years. At a certain age and after a certain amount of development and experience, you all know what it is and where it's going. Also, we all chimed in on writing and co-writing, so we all knew what the intention was, you know what I mean?
I do, but didn't you miss that moment when you look at the drummer and they look at you, and you know you're both going to play something at the end of the bar?
Oh, I know. I do this anyway, but on this album I played the songs a ton of times over and over in seven different ways, because
I was trying to imagine being in a room and getting that feeling.
If the technology existed so that you could work remotely and the timing would be perfect, with no delay, it would be fine. There's companies coming out with that stuff. One of them is called Sessionwire, and they're doing some cool stuff that I'm involved with. It sounds cool, and it's almost close enough to be really workable.
The company that cracks that is going to make a fortune.
RICK SAVAGE, DEF LEPPARD ew rock bass players have embraced their unique position within a band as well as Def Leppard's Rick 'Sav' Savage. But then again, he's a lot more than a bass player, contributing to the songs' often-grandiose harmonies live on stage, co-writing many of their biggest tracks and even going as far as tracking some of the guitars-something which bass players are rarely afforded the opportunity to do-over a career spanning four and a half decades.
It's this vantage point that gives him a greater understanding of his instrument's role in the context of a group, acting almost as the mediator between melody and rhythm. That's as apparent now, on this year's twelfth studio album Diamond Star Halos, as it was on 1987's best-seller Hysteria.
"The bass player is the glue and has an observation point that encompasses all sides of the band," he explains. "You're the bridge between the rhythm and the melody. From that viewpoint, you can see things a lot clearer and without you the whole thing will fall apart. Certainly not in our band, but I do get the impression that in a lot of groups the guitar players are mainly focused on guitars and don't really venture beyond that, because... well, they're guitar players and all about playing guitar! Singers can be very much the same way: They front the band
ROAR
Masters of arena-conquering anthems, Def Leppard have returned with a new album, Diamond Star Halos. Bassist Rick Savage tells BP about his love for Sting, why playing with a pick isn't always best practice-and how the perennial rockers pieced together one of their finest albums since Hysteria.
Interview: Amit Sharma Photography: Getty and mainly focus on lyrics and melodies. And actually, some of my favorite bass players are the ones who sing, like Sting, who totally gets it. His bass parts will be in sympathy with his vocal lines, because he's the one doing both. I love that-it's always about the song."
If there's a quality to his own playing, continues Savage, it's centered around his awareness of what he's there to do. And in Def Leppard, his job is to ensure that the twin guitars and big vocal harmonies are portrayed in their best light, while also locking in with Rick Allen's drums.
"The bass player tends to have the view of everybody in equal measure, including the drummer. I always feel like I'm the fulcrum in our band—the balancing act who can hear every side of the argument. Normally, the compromise is me. That's my role. Usually they say, 'Well, if Sav thinks so, then fuck it, go with what he says!""
The new music feels like Def Leppard's finest for quite some time. The opening track 'Take What You Want'-one of Savage's main co-writes carries all the flair of their biggest anthems, treated with a hard-hitting modern edge. As ever, it's the juxtaposition between their mellifluous Beatles-indebted melodies and driving rock riffs that takes the music to its limits, proving yet again just why Def Leppard were destined for greater things than the New
Wave Of British Heavy Metal movement into which they were lumped early on.
"""Take What You Want' started on acoustic, and yeah, the descending line is quite Beatlesy," says Savage. "Later on, I decided to take that acoustic riff onto a proper electric and it sounded huge. One of the best things about recording this album was the fact we were sat in our own little studios, doing our own bits. You start experimenting because nobody else has to listen. You've got nothing to lose. I came up with things I wouldn't normally come up with if I was with the band in the studio, because people start looking at the clocks and wondering when they get to solo... We used the extra time from the pandemic to solidify things and make an album that we'd never have been able to finish until 2024."
Other highlights on the album include mid-tempo rocker 'Kick' ("a groovy and fun song influenced by T-Rex and the early Seventies"), the octave-layered 'Fire It Up' ("We double-tracked my bass with a dirty Moog sound for extra thickness") and country ballad 'This Guitar', which saw Savage ditching the pick for a fingerstyle approach. Though he's predominantly stuck with a plectrum over the years, the new track- featuring guest vocals from the bluegrass singer Alison Krauss-involved some high slides that called for more warmth in delivery.
"I'm the fulcrum in our band-the balancing act who can hear every side of the argument"
AND FINALLY...
|n this month's lesson, I want to take a different look at the pentatonic scale and break it down in a way that might help you better understand some of the common phrases and exercises associated with this scale. Using this breakdown, we'll go through some beautiful melodic phrases and patterns that will definitely help to expand your vocabulary. So grab your bass, and let's begin!
We'll focus on the G minor pentatonic scale and the B flat major pentatonic scale for this lesson. Why? Well, because they're the same scale. B, is the relative major of G minor. Here's a very simple
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Rich Brown guides us to Advanced level every month. Read on as he takes us to the very top of bass theory!
way to think about this. Whenever you play a minor pentatonic scale, the relative major scale is found on the second of that minor pentatonic.
The second note of the G minor pentatonic scale is B. Playing the major pentatonic scale from that second note will give you the relative major.
any confusion, the bottom pair of each grouping will contain the lowest notes. Now that the pairs have been established, we can put them to work.
I've talked a bit about this in a previous lesson, so I won't go into too much detail here: Let's get into the breakdown. Have a look at Exercise 1.
gives us four notes below the dividing line (G, C, F, and B flat on the 3rd fret) and four above the dividing line (B flat on the 6th fret, and D, G, and C on the 5th fret).
For the next step, we can look at each of these four-note groupings and break them down into three separate note pairs, as illustrated in the next exercise.
EXERCISE 1
These examples show a different breakdown of the major and minor pentatonic scales. Think about this as a way of dividing each scale in half: In the case of G minor pentatonic, you can think of the 4th fret as a dividing line. This line
We can now easily surmize that each pentatonic scale contains six different note pairs in total, and if we look at Exercises 3 and 4, we can play these pairs in order, starting from each degree of the scale. This pattern might already sound
Each grouping contains a top pair, then a middle pair and a bottom pair. To avoid
EXERCISE FOUR
EXERCISE FIVE
2:4 played descending, but for this exercise and the exercises that follow, I will combine the two scales to create a larger exercise or melodic phrase. The objective is to become accustomed to playing these two shapes together as one 'macro-scale'. Getting this larger shape into the muscle memory will allow you to see more of the fretboard as you improvise. Again, I've talked about this in previous lessons. Ultimately, understanding all the options available to you is essential to your creativity.
familiar to you, but I think there's something about breaking this exercise down into pairs that makes the pattern more memorable.
The other advantage of thinking in terms of these 'pentatonic pairs' is that we can change the direction of these pairs to create different melodic patterns. For example, in Exercises 3 and 4, we played each pair ascending to create the resulting melodic pattern. In Exercise 5, each pair is
As each pair is played from high to low, you can hear a change in the characteristic tonality of the scale. To my ears, this is a beautiful melodic pattern and one I can easily integrate into my solos, bass-lines and fills. We'll discuss how to apply ideas effectively in a future lesson. For now, let's get back to our pentatonic pairs.
You can see how thinking of the minor and major pentatonic scales in this way allows you to see them differently. For example, you might use the pairs to come up with different sequences to explore the ENT
Listen to Flea's bass parts: You'll hear plenty of pentatonics in there.
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