Bass Fingerings

About the Book

Bass Fingerings: Improve Your Left-Hand Game is a concise but thorough treatise and workbook on the many facets of devising fingerings for the string bass. This book is primarily designed for intermediate bassists, which usually means ages 14 to 20, but which could be any age from 6 to 80. The purpose of this book is to provide you with much of the basic information that you need in order to become good at devising fingerings for the bass. This is the book for you if: You know how to shift but you do not currently devise your own fingerings. You can devise fingerings, but you are frequently unhappy with the results. You devise your own fingerings, but you frequently encounter other fingering ideas that you had not previously considered. TABLE OF CONTENTS Part 1: Preliminaries Chapter 1—Introduction Chapter 2— A System for Marking Fingerings Chapter 2.5—Random-Note Quiz Part 2: The Basics Chapter 3— The Basics: Priorities of Shifting Chapter 4— The Basics, Continued Chapter 5—Know Your Patterns Chapter 6— Stretching the Left Hand Chapter 7—Putting It All Together Part 3: Applications Chapter 8—Baroque Music Chapter 9—General Quiz on Fingerings Chapter 10—Awkward Passages Chapter 11—Increasing Your Options Chapter 12—Chromaticism and Difficult Key Signatures Chapter 13—Test Yourself against Other Intermediate Bassists Chapter 13.5—Random High Note Mini-Quiz Chapter 14—High Registers Part 4: Advanced Topics Chapter 15—Advanced Topics Chapter 16—Thinking Outside the Box Chapter 17—Conclusions

About the Author

Benjamin Whitcomb lives with his wife, Pamela, and twin sons in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Benjamin was born in Florida, but spent most of his childhood in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He attended Oklahoma State University (BM, cello performance), Boston University, and the University of Texas at Austin (MM, cello performance; PhD, music theory), and he has studied with Evan Tonsing, George Neikrug, and Phyllis Young. Benjamin and Pamela moved to Wisconsin in 1999 when Benjamin joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where he is currently professor of Cello and Music Theory. Benjamin performs frequently in solo and chamber music recitals. He is a member of the Madison-based Ancora String Quartet (www.ancoraquartet.com) and the UW-W Piano Trio. He has also been a member several orchestras in Texas and Wisconsin. Benjamin frequently performs duo recitals around the country and abroad with pianist Vincent de Vries. Benjamin’s primary area of research is string pedagogy. Numerous articles of his have been published in such journals as American String Teacher, Strings, Stringendo (the journal of AUSTA), The Instrumentalist, and Theoria. He is a contributing author to Sharpen Your String Technique and to Teaching Music through Performance in Orchestra, vol. 3, and chaired the committee that revised the cello portion of the most recent ASTA String Syllabus. He has presented papers, master classes, and workshops at universities and conferences throughout the United States and abroad. His other books, The Advancing String Player’s Handbooks series, have received rave reviews and are available for through your favorite online bookstore. Benjamin is fascinated by many aspects of string playing, including fingerings. Do you have a passage that requires an interesting or unusual fingering? Drop him a line to talk about it. He can be reached by email at whitcomb@uww.edu or through his website, www.benjaminwhitcomb.com.