Donna Lee fingerings (yet another Bongo video)

[Alvabass]

(As posted to TalkBass, with slight changes where needed)


Hi everybody.

One of my friends at TalkBass asked me for a video playing this tune in this thread about Donna Lee fingerings and since this is another Bongo-in-action video, I also want to share it with the EBMM community:

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-3IpGPFV60"]YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.[/nomedia]

I decided to play it on my fretless Bongo just because I prefer that tone for this piece. Here are the video notes I sent to YouTube:

The idea is to show my suggested fingerings in my version of the tune (maybe some of you will disagree with my note choices at certain points). No frets in this video, but positions can be found in the transcription. I also omitted legato phrasings since I think that although less musical, picking every note is a better exercise for speed. You'll see it played at "Jaco" speed (If I only were that clean and my intonation were that perfect...), half speed and 1/4 speed. Far from perfect, of course, but anyway I hope it will be useful.

As you'll notice, my vibrato is very nervous. That's one of my biggest frustrations. I feel very comfortable playing bending-style vibrato and I think I can play it very well, but classical vibrato has been a nightmare for me. Years of practicing it with my double bass haven't worked for me. Anyway, and regardless of the mistakes (the quick correction at 1:38 looks funny to me), I hope this material will be useful to all fellow EBMM players interested on learning this tune.

P.S.: In case you missed it, I also recorded another video playing "Portrait Of Tracy", but this time on my fretted Bongo, just for tone comparison purposes:

[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGpefHm5sdM"]YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.[/nomedia]

 

[soniq]

Awesome playing Alva...excellent.