Hi!

Does anyone have any experience of learning the double bass after playing the cello. I'm considering learning the double bass because our orchestra desperately needs double bass players and the cello section is ok at the moment. How long do you think it would take to get to a reasonable standard on the double bass - so I could play in the orchestra. Are we talking three months? six months? more? Hard work and time isn't a problem and I could easily get a good teacher.

I learnt the double bass very quickly at school as there was only one other and they needed another so I offered. Its the same as the violin but the other way round - so double bass=big elephants violin=small elephants ie. Elephants Always Drop Grapes. I found it really easy playing in the orchetra because the vibrations were so strong you knew if you were in tune or not very quicky just by feeling it. I got very sore fingers for the first couple of months. And a sore arm because bowing was very heavy. I wasnt a serious double basser and never had one of my own, just used the schools 3/4 one and got lessons from my freind who was g.5 and occasional lessons with the double bass peri if he had time. Its not as hard as some, and the bass parts in most peices are never too challenging!

Hi, i'm a grade 8 violinist, and i have started to play double bass. It has taken me approx. 2 months to get to somewhere between grade 3 and 5 standard. The only thing stopping me from getting higher is just good tone production, because the bow requires more pressure than on the violin as you can imagine. But i'm sure you'll only take a few months to become really good, as i have also had to learn bass clef, and when it comes to reading tenor clef, i suppose you can already do that too, whereas i cant.

Dont quite understand the bit about the elephants but I switched from violin to double bass at school too and I agree it is not too hard to pick up. Easier still for a cellist than a violinist I should think. In an orchestra you can't hear what your playing a lot of the time so you keep in tune by feel. Many of the notes you are playing are also played by the 'cellos but an octave higher and this means it is much easier to get the strings moving when in an orchestra than when playing the same thing on your own while practising.

Yes, in a sense, but I was never a very good 'cellist, so I didn't have much to change.

How soon you can play in an orchestra depends partly on your musical skills and partly on the standard required. If you know what a part should sound like just by looking at it, you can join orchestral rehearsals as soon as you can hold the bass, and play in concerts as soon as you can look as if you're playing it even when you are not. You play what you can and fake what you can't play.

Our local amateur orchestra went through a period when I was the only regular bass player. For concerts, invited players and professionals made up the section. I continued to lead the section, even though many of the other players had much better technique, because I knew how the part should sound (especially for Shostakovich 10,* which rather few of us had played before). However, when we played Mahler 1, one of the visitors played the solo, by agreement among her, the conductor and me.

* One of my favourite musical memories is the sound of seven basses playing the quiet opening, the conductor having asked the 'cellos to play quietly enough to let the bass sound through.

Sorry, I imagin that was a little confusing, on a violin, the highest string is an E, so, little instrument=little elephant, but on the double bass, it is the lowest string which is an E so big instrument=big elephant. Please excuse me, I am just woodwind who pretends to be a string player once in a while!

Hi there!

Thanks for all your replies which were very interesting. Especially the one about the Elephants - all I could think of was the Saint Saens Carnival of the Animals Elephant!!

Mysteryd, I hadn't thought about the fact that I obviously already know the bass and tenor cleff. Hopefully the bowing wont be too much heavier than the cello, but here again, I would be interested to know.

Kenm - at the risk of sound like a painful perfectionist, I'm afraid faking it isn't my style. I think that's really why I'm so interested in how long it would take for a Cellist who already plays all the main orchestral and quartet repertoire to be able to transfer to the double bass. Also whether anyone found the double bass parts slow as in not much to do compared to the cello parts and how they coped with this.

My dilemma is whether it's being over optimistic to take the leap and opt for our June concert as a bassist instead of a cellist playing all those lovely tunes!!

Yes, I started the double bass last year, but they are big instruments to house, so I sort of gave up.

Now I'm under pressure to return to it again because the exisiting double bass teacher (with the teaching service) is hoping to cut down his work soon, in preparation for retirement, and they are going to need someone to replace him. It looks like they've got me lined up as the replacement.......

It depends what the repertoire is. In an ideal world the double bass was built for comfort not speed, but some bass parts are quite challenging, in fact more challenging and speedier than you think. When you consider the size of the instrument and just how much ground you have to cover when playing semiquavers, then there's a lot of hard work going on.

I found tone production the hardest part, especially on slurred passages. The bow pressure required is quite substantial. Changing the strings to something that required less effort to get a good sound from helped a lot.

Awww I bet that was good - seven basses!! WOW!

It's surprising how small the sound is from such a large instrument!!! The notes being so low don't carry too well, well, not as far as human hearing is concerned. If you were an elephant you'd be able to communicate over miles of land using infrasound

I now have visions of elephants playing double basses........

It's funny how the elephant and double bass are often images put together, even in music books. Maybe Saint Saens and his 'Carnival of the Animals' is to blame

Why do you want to play in an orchestra if you could be playing Debussy, Ravel, Janacek, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg ("Lyric Suite"!!!), Maconchy and Shostakovich with a quartet?

In the Classical repertoire they are the same, with a few divergences (mostly Beethoven, Mozart 41) and the occasional need to jump up an octave if you have a four-string with no extension.

Probably I do think that mvt of the Carnival is fab

[quote name='kenm' date='Feb 12 2007, 08:53 PM' post='462878'] (how do I do quotes properly?!)
Why do you want to play in an orchestra if you could be playing Debussy, Ravel, Janacek, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg ("Lyric Suite"!!!), Maconchy and Shostakovich with a quartet?"

Because I could play bass in an orchestra and still do quartets on the cello! I play at least twice a week with two different quartets and do weddings etc with a third group.

Thanks Amanda L for your input too. I guess the distance between the strings would slow things down abit and up the work load! I've since learned too that the bass is strung in 4ths so I'm not sure if my mind would ever convert. I think I would subconsciously keep trying to play the bass as if it were a cello! I'm still pondering but I think I may have a go anyway and see what I think.

Thanks everyone for their help!

I'm confused.

Are there many variations in bass stringing? Admittedly it was decades ago I played Bass and only ever used two instruments, but I'm sure they were strung exactly one octave below a cello on A, D, G, C. Partly why I was confused by the elephants and E string comments.

Charlie Cello - it's not so much the distance between the strings that slows things down but lower pitch strings take a longer bow movement to get them to resonate. Whilst a violin E string seems to me to need about 1mm of bow movement to make a sound a Bass seems to need about 2cm movement to create a vibration. All subject to technique of course as this video demonstrates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIqBtKJ2T_M

I am not a bass player, but as far as I am aware and all the basses I've ever "met" have been strung G, D, A, E - the opposite way around to a violin. Occasionally they have an extra string but I don't know which end it goes on Some have an extension on the E string (lowest) so it can play a few notes (not sure how many) below that E - I believe there is some kind of mechanism which allows the open string to be either E as usual or the lower note.

Not sure if this makes much sense sorry.......

ps that is one of my all time favourite youtube vids

edit: just found an article about tuning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bass#Tuning

and this shows a low C extension: http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp...C_extension.jpg

Thanks for the link Sarah-flute. It does mention that some players use C,G,D,A tuning in fifths so perhaps I'm remembering correctly the instruments I used. Perhaps my school had them set up that way to make it easier for violin or cello players to make the switch

Yup, entirely possible - I think they're usually tuned in 4ths to make the stretches easier.

That is an unusual tuning, but good for someone with a very large stretch between the fingers. Sarah-flute gives the standard fingering for a four-string - G, D, A, E - but some composers ask for notes lower than the bottom E, and many players will lower the bottom string to produce them.[1] D is about the limit to get a good sound from a fourth string of standard thickness, so if you tuned your fourth string to C, it would probably have been made as a fifth string. Five-string basses almost invariably have G, D, A, E for the first four, but I believe that the fifth string is mostly tuned to B in Europe and C in the US (though with exceptions in both places). On four-string basses with extended fingerboards, a hinged stubby rod or finger (sometimes cam-operated) can terminate the fourth string to give E, but when it is released, an adjustable nut terminates it to give the C below.[2] The nut (rather like a miniature bridge resting on the fingerboard extension) is adjustable to allow the C and E to be tuned relative to each other. The long C string is the same thickness as a standard E string.

[1] Next Sunday, I shall be playing (on horn) the Nielsen "Serenata Invano" with a bass player who leaves her fourth string tuned to D.

[2] But when I played in Strauss's "Also sprach Zarathustra", our conductor asked me to tune down to B for the fugue.

OK, so curiosity got the better of me and I've wasted two hours rummaging around in old boxes in the attic. I found a copy of Tune a Day for double bass. It's so old that it has the price actually printed as part of the cover design like they used to do before anybody had heard of inflation.

Yes, I was wrong. It is the book I learnt from and it describes tuning in 4ths up from E. Funny what tricks the mind can play when you get old. Just in case people are wondering how old, the price of the tune a day book was 5/- !! Honest it wasn't new when I had it, it was given to me by somebody else second hand.