This is my contribution to a theme started by Hive account@slobberchops to feature 'alternative' music, whatever you take that to mean. I regard it as music outside the mainstream that needs more listeners. BTW Mr Chops has started a new Alternative Album thread with a great review of the latest by Steven Wilson. Check it out.

I've been featuring a different artist each week recently. This time it's a bass player. A few years back I was wanting to play with a band and considered taking up bass as there might be more openings since there are so many guitarists. As I was spending a lot of time in the car I looked for podcasts about bass to try and learn more. I found one called Beautiful Bass by a guy called Jeff Schmidt. I'm not sure it's available these days unless someone has it archived.

I checked out Jeff's music. As with others I've featured he is on Bandcamp where you can listen to it all. I bought his album Outre which is all solo bass pieces. I think that was my introduction to this type of music and it led to others that I may feature some time.

Fury

This is not the best video, but it gives some appreciation of his playing. You may notice he's left-handed, but it may not be clear that he has the strings reversed. I assume that's because he started off on a right-handed bass that he just turned upside down. He plays a variety of basses including some tuned higher than usual or just using different tunings.

Live on fretless piccolo

I don't know what this piece is called, but it's great anyway. He's not using loops, but he gets such a rich sound. I find bass can be such an expressive instrument. I'd compare it to cello. Both have a range a bit like the human voice.

Ash On Dust - The Fall

This project was with another bassist called Steve Uccello. I don't think Jeff has put out much solo bass work recently, but this is great too. More fretless on this with some electronic backing.

Ruiner Severhead - Dark Sided

Jeff seems to be doing lots of sound design and soundtrack work for various people these days. That may be more profitable than putting out his personal projects.

Ruiner Severhead was an experimental project he put out. He said that after making the beautiful Outre he needed to make something ugly. This is not exactly easy listening. There's lots of distortion and it uses lots of spoken recordings. It might be considered an anti-christian work, but I think it's more about the mis-use of religion to control people. It seems even more appropriate these days.

I hope you find something of interest here. You can buy his music on Bandcamp and with much of it you can set your own price! I just wish that site accepted Steem.

Rock on!

I'm Steve, the geeky guitarist.

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