Category: Stu’s Blog

Licensing Music for Print…

I’ve been writing transcription books for nearly twenty years now. During that time, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that no matter how difficult the material you’re transcribing, the hardest part of the whole process is still getting everything correctly licensed. This year I went through the licensing procedure for a book called Bass Monsters […]

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New Video Courses

Over the past few years, music education has changed significantly. Whilst many musicians continue to enjoy learning with a teacher, or from a book, there are a growing number of young people who now turn to online video platforms such as YouTube, or more specialist sites when they want to learn something new. As a […]

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Rewriting Giants of Bass

Back in 2004, I wrote a book for Sanctuary Publishing called Giants of Bass. It was based on a similar book that the company had published for guitar and featured twenty famous bass players, mostly of my choosing. For each player I wrote a biography, a selected discography and gave advice about their individual playing […]

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My Top 3 Bass Books

I’ve worked in music education for a number of years now and I realised recently that I often talk to my students about the bass guitar tuition books that were important to me when I was learning. For the sake of space, I’ve tried to boil this down to list of just three books, all […]

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Writing the Books I’d Want to Read

I’ve recently been working on a new book, a Marcus Miller transcription book featuring tunes from his 2012 album Renaissance. The book only contains five songs, but they’re long, complex pieces that have been challenging and time-consuming to transcribe. But they’re done. I recently mentioned to someone that I had completed the transcription work on […]

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Adventures in Digital Publishing

Musicians are typically people with a lot of books and I’m no exception: here in my office, I have shelf after shelf groaning under the weight of all the tuition and transcription books I’ve accumulated over the years, not to mention my extensive collection of bass magazines. The problem with having a lot of books […]

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London Bass Guitar Show 2015

I’m writing this after a few days of reflection on the London Bass Guitar Show 2015. It was my fifth year at the show, and my fourth as an exhibitor with my company Bassline Publishing. Like I suspect many of the other exhibitors do, every year I wonder if the show will be as successful […]

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Level 42 – A Physical Presence Bass Transcriptions

Today’s a big day. I’ve just released three new books through Bassline Publishing: Advanced Studies for Bass Guitar, Plectrum Technique for Bass Guitar, and Level 42 A Physical Presence Bass Transcriptions. The latter is a book that I first published back in 2006 but it’s one which people have consistently asked for ever since it […]

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