Just how important is the relationship between bassist and luthier?

A friend of mine from England had a great idea for a research paper. He thought it would be interesting to interview a few luthiers and bass players to get their idea of what they thought about the relationship between a luthier and a bassist.

The interviewer is a nice bassist from London England named Greg Cordez (picture on the right), who interviewed Barrie Kolstein (USA), Martin Penning (UK), and myself (da Bronx).

When Greg told me about the idea, I thought it was an amazing thing to research. Just last year in Argentina I spent a good 20 minutes of a master class telling everyone that they need to learn what to ask for from their luthiers, but it never occurred to me to actually write out my thoughts. I’d like to give a HUGE thank you to Greg for actually following though with this and letting me publish an excerpt of it here on my blog. I hope he keeps the ball rolling, since this is such an important topic that often gets overlooked by bassists.

Hello world! That’s what I’ve been staring at for the last two weeks while I’ve been designing my new website. Thank’s to the miracle of the WordPress, which is an unbelievably powerful open source blogging code, I’ll be able to bring a whole new level of usability to this site!

First off, you’ll notice a whole new level of shopping experience. Gone are the old clumsy PayPal buttons scattered around the site, grouping bundled packages. Now you can simply select what ever item you’d like, be it CD, download, or book, and check out when you’re ready. I can even offer discounts for buying multiple items! If you by a LaFaro book and any of my personal CDs, you can enter the coupon code BOOKANDCD during checkout to receive $5 off of your order.

The site may be 99% complete in terms of functionality, but now I have to focus on adding content. I receive a lot of questions from people all over the world about everything from bass strings to turntables. It seemed like a good idea to finally add a blog to my website so I can share my answers with everyone (and only have to type them once!)

I have some long term ideas for the site as well. I’m beginning to write a method book based on all of the ideas I talk about in my master classes, so I was thinking of adding a subscription based area of the website for video tutorials and resources. Until then, I’m beginning to accept students via Skype, which has been working out great.

I’m still working out the bugs, so please bear with me whist I work out the bugs. If you have any problems with the site, please don’t hesitate to let me know!

Thanks for visiting!

–Phil