Bass Player UK Magazine September 2015 Back Issue

While Bass Guitar Magazine is by definition a monthly celebration of musicianship – in our case the gear, techniques and influences that we need to make music at low frequencies – let’s not forget that we also inhabit the music industry, whether your band tours stadiums or you’re strictly a social media inhabitant. As such, it behoves all of us wannabe rock (or funk, or jazz, or blues, or EDM) stars to understand how this business works, and while our world-beating interview with Level 42 bassist and leader Mark King is definitely about bass, it’s also about how he keeps his band up, running and profitable. That’s no mean feat in an era when the flow of money into record companies’ pockets has reduced from a mighty tsunami (when we were all paying £18.99 for a CD, like mad people) to a mere trickle (now that streaming services pay artists a billionth of a cent when someone hits the play button). Read and learn!
Perspectives on bass world vary throughout this issue, as always, whether it’s the wisdom of bassists such as John Campbell of Lamb Of God, John Robb of the Membranes and Al Barrow of Magnum, or the bass educator Scott Devine, or the luthier Pete Skjold. We also report back from Summer NAMM in Nashville and road-test a superb range of bass equipment, from a 13-string bass to a headphone amp the size of a match box. As always, our hand-picked elite crew of bass tutors have collated several careers’ worth of wisdom for you, all with the stated aim of making you a better bass player. Get to it, and we’ll see you in a month!