working tuba players: fixing sears-and-roebuck bass lines in pops quintet arrangements

[bloke]

I encounter a surprising number of otherwise pretty good quintet arrangements of popular tunes from various decades and various styles with badly written bass lines.

If I read them more than once, I nearly always repair them. I'm not talking about playing way too many notes or playing some "cool" alternate implied chord bass line that doesn't fit with the alto and soprano instruments. I'm just talking about acknowledging the passing chords without getting too busy, maybe adding a rhythm kick that's missing, or just plain old replacing bad/wrong notes with the right notes - due to oversimplification, or just some arranger that apparently never played bass or just isn't talented or experienced at writing bass lines.

Two out of twelve arrangements played today (three venues) needed help. Understand that I didn't change things to draw attention to the tuba, but changed to things to make the ensemble sound better.

I have to believe that Wade has done this a bunch.
...Do others of you fix stuff in quintet arrangement crappy bass lines?

[the elephant]

We have about a dozen tunes in our quintet folder that, once we had read them initially (decades ago) I have only ever played them by ear, as I do in a traditional jazz band setting. I know the tunes, I "know' the arrangements, and I try to make a bass line that fits the tune and what is going on in the other parts. These (as Joe called them) "repairs" vary from performance to performance. but usually work out pretty well.

I play in two excellent quintets, and our two styles and sounds are very different, but we share a lot of common music as the rep is just not that big. We "cross-pollinate" a lot, subbing back and forth when needed. On very rare occasions, we have something complex enough (involving several performances with a different lineup at each one due to individual scheduling conflicts) so that we actually have to REHEARSE (which neither group does unless we are performing a formal recital). In such cases, everyone involved will be present, so we could have nine brass players and a drummer reading quintet stuff.

In one of these cases, one of the horns (sitting next to me) was laying out so the other one could play, and she watched my part as I played. At the end of the piece, she laughingly asked, "Did you play *anything* that's on that page? And do you do that all the time?"

I replied, "You don't want to hear the written part. It sucks."

I have fixed all the Frackenpohl Christmas stuff, by way of example. The cheesy five-voice harmony that REEKS of bad 1970s TV show-style "funk" sounds better without the bottom voice. I simply play a walking bassline and the harmonies not only sound somewhat better (to my ears) but the piece starts to become cohesive and has a groove to it that is sort of denied by the boxiness of the arrangement. I think doing this in a limited way can take a *very good* arrangement and make it into an *excellent* arrangement.

For the Frackenpohl pieces, I have taken the time to write them into the score to make sure that there are no holes or places where I am stepping on someone. (Less is better.) Doing this also makes what I do consistent from gig to gig and year to year. When we add set drums to these arrangements it *really* makes a difference.

Well, in my personal, slack-jawed-yokel opinion, that is.

[bloke]

I'd love to rehearse some of this stuff (and maybe some so-called "serious" stuff). I live over an hour away from where we all meet, and two others live well over two hours away. One player lives in the city where we perform. I sort of doubt that we'll ever perform an actual "former recital" anytime in the near future based on management, because we're only paid to plop ourselves down and play performances, but rehearsals haven't been scheduled since early covid.
Today we played three little things with a totally fresh horn player, who did a (truly) wonderful job, and he was reading everything. ...I'm just now recalling an interesting comment of his, as he's finishing up a terminal degree in horn performance. He actually admitted that it's refreshing play stuff that people actually like to listen to, vs. offering patrons at (typically) universities' recitals a constant barrage of show-off stuff that is rarely easily audited/understood by patrons.

And I'm really glad to hear that other people - who I suspected were doing so - are fixing some of these ~potentially~ OK-to-good little pops arrangements, either on-the-fly or on paper.

I really didn't have time to do these three little jobs today, but I think playing in nursing homes is important. It does some good for the people who are there, but it does a whole lot of good for me too because - whether they start out excited that we're there and remain excited or whether they start out really looking down in the dumps and end up being in a sort of okay mood at the end, both of those are improvements and just playing music and getting off of my property for a day does me a lot of good, and does a lot of good for my own mental health... and even if the tuba parts are horrible, and I have to make up stuff that sounds better.

[bone-a-phone]

This is a great opportunity to do 3 things I like to do : hijack tuba threads, complain about bass trombone and talk about what a bad tuba player I am.

I started a brass quintet specifically so I could play tenor trombone. I play bass bone in all the groups I'm in right now because we can't find any bass bone players around here. And guess what happens. Right, I can't find a tuba player to save my life.

So first, I tried to play tuba, but my mental health suffered, so I sold the tuba. I'm doing better now, thanks. They loosened the straight jacket 2 notches this week.

Next I recruited another trombone player to play tuba. And honestly, he is worse than I was. Can't find partials, no articulation finesse. Gets confused about valves. Gets lost when there are more than 2 ledger lines, drags time because he's trying to figure it all out on the fly- typical trombone player stuff like that.

I mean you look at tuba parts, and they're like ooom, pah, ooom pah, and on and on, surely this is something I can do.

So I tried playing tuba parts on bass bone. On about half the tunes it works, and doing so is actually an improvement over all the bad tuba playing the rest of the group has been subjected to. . On the other half, its hard to say its my fault, or the low range or all the moving around down low or just what it is.

At the end of a rehearsal I felt like I had been kissing the wrong end of a camel for an hour straight. There's a sloppy wet ring about 6 inches in diameter around my mouth. My scalp is wet and everything looks a little fuzzy because either the slop is also on my glasses or I'm hyperventilating from all the low notes.

Do these tuba parts need fixed? Yes. They need to be taken up an octave and made to sound less like a tunable bass drum. And they surely don't need a frustrated tenor bone player farting and splatting all over them. A walking bass line more than one ledger line down on bass bone is like a kid stomping through mud puddles.

Anybody want to move to western Virginia to play tuba in a quintet? I guarantee we'll be enthusiastic about seeing you. If you also play bass bone, there's a ton of opportunity. Of course then I'll be out of work because we have a ton of great retired bone players around here.

[Snake Charmer]

Being the only tuba in my village band I did this bass line pimping for more than 20 years. Sometimes it was hard to get back to the written part when for a concert some other tuba was hired to assist.
In my brass quintet I took the next step: over some time I replaced most not-so-good pieces with my own arrangements.

[bloke]

Wade has done a lot of really excellent arranging. From having done a little bit of it, I have a good knack for doing transcriptions and reductions, but I've only done arranging once or twice. Arranging is more difficult than writing reductions, and requires much more creativity. I can do it when I feel creative, but I don't feel creative all that often. I suspect that Wade really doesn't feel creative all that often, but somehow finds ways to be creative, and I think that's probably hard.

I've played electric bass in clubs and other places enough thousands of hours to know what good bass lines sound like. I can fix crummy bass lines in quintet arrangements, but writing arrangements and writing transcriptions is a whole bunch more work than is the original topic of this thread.

[Mary Ann]

Anybody want to move to western Virginia to play tuba in a quintet? I guarantee we'll be enthusiastic about seeing you. I

I would in a heartbeat. I'm a tuba player looking for a quintet. I have a long-term quintet but play the bone part on a euph, which I suck at.
I tried to move to VA (C'ville) a few years ago but it went bust. I think I'm stuck in AZ for the duration.

[bone-a-phone]

Anybody want to move to western Virginia to play tuba in a quintet? I guarantee we'll be enthusiastic about seeing you. I

I would in a heartbeat. I'm a tuba player looking for a quintet. I have a long-term quintet but play the bone part on a euph, which I suck at.
I tried to move to VA (C'ville) a few years ago but it went bust. I think I'm stuck in AZ for the duration.

You'd fit right in. Our lead trumpet is female.

I think you'd like Roanoke better than C'ville. Less uptight, better climate, better cost of living, further from DC. Here you'd get all the tiba gigs, just knowing which end to blow in.

[iiipopes]

If I read them more than once, I nearly always repair them. I'm not talking about playing way too many notes or playing some "cool" alternate implied chord bass line that doesn't fit with the alto and soprano instruments. I'm just talking about acknowledging the passing chords without getting too busy, maybe adding a rhythm kick that's missing, or just plain old replacing bad/wrong notes with the right notes - due to oversimplification, or just some arranger that apparently never played bass or just isn't talented or experienced at writing bass lines.

Yes. So do I. And on occasion when I am the only tuba in a community concert band, I fix the bass lines there also, with the blessing of the conductor. I once took a Beach Boys medley and some staff paper and had to fix about 1/4 of it that was just plain wrong: wrong notes, wrong chords, wrong phrasings, etc. We were having a difficult time locking down the arrangement. After I fixed the bass lines (keeping in mind the principles bloke sets forth) and it sounded more like the records, all the problem areas and motifs almost miraculously
fixed themselves, since the upper voices had the proper foundation to bounce off of.

[Mary Ann]

Pretty funny --- just for kicks I went on zillow and looked at Roanoke houses, and the first one I pulled up looked just fine and cost less than half of what I could get for mine here. Houses here have gone ridiculous in pricing. The one just kitty corner from me that is smaller than mine just sold for $620k. Ridiculous, getting close to three times what I paid for mine nine years ago. No WAY I could afford my own house now.

[bloke]

Pretty funny --- just for kicks I went on zillow and looked at Roanoke houses, and the first one I pulled up looked just fine and cost less than half of what I could get for mine here. Houses here have gone ridiculous in pricing. The one just kitty corner from me that is smaller than mine just sold for $620k. Ridiculous, getting close to three times what I paid for mine nine years ago. No WAY I could afford my own house now.

Yeah. I hear some prices have gone up as much as 16% on some things. I believe I heard CNN say that. Actually, they said that I typical basket of groceries from 2020 that cost $100 has zoomed all the way up to $120.

I always watch the news, because I need to be informed, and get the truth so I'm not fooled by false news on Facebook and then I don't have to even rely on their fact checkers.