Global Bass Online                                                                                April 2001

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Warren Piece

 

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‘Warren Piece’ for April 2001

When it was confirmed that Ron Carter would be our guest for the Cover Story this month, Global’s webmaster and my business associate, Marty Straub, was very impressed & pleased. He told me that Ron is someone that truly deserves more press than he receives and that he was and is integral to the acoustic side of bass playing, so I could certainly understand the excitement.

Tony Senatore, our correspondent in New York, literally lives across the river from Ron, so I offered the interview to him figuring that this would give the talk a distinctly ‘New York’ feel to the article. Tony opted with this one to go the ‘article’ way of doing things, instead of our usual ‘call and response’ interview style.

Tony has become quite prolific these days, also submitting interviews in this issue with Mel Brown and Gene Perla. He will be manning our New York position from this point on.

We also welcome a young lady bassist from Switzerland, a Miss Edith Hofmann in her first foray into the magazine. She is fluent in German and has begun translating articles for us in that language. In  coming issues she will be writing in both English and German, transcribing and conducting interviews for Global Bass.

As well, we have a great article on Ed Friedland written by our South American correspondent, Sabastián Caffini. He also does our Spanish translations and has submitted articles for us previously as well. His own site, contains many Global Bass interviews already in Spanish.

We also welcome back Andy Long, a Welsh bassist and writer for this magazine, as he interviews Nick Beggs, bassist for many English bands, including Kajagoogoo. Andy will be our U.K. correspondent, concentrating on two things…interviews and articles with U.K.’s finest and most interesting bassists and secondly just generally driving me up the wall with his witty and ever so slightly insane emails. I like the guy but am often relieved he lives thousands of miles from me! He looked so normal in his pictures too?!?!

Brent-Anthony Johnson, American bassist and composer, came up with a rather ingenious idea of developing a ‘round table’ of 5 bassists, hashing it out over ideas and philosophies on bass playing. Brent has written for us before and will again, because I know where he lives! Brent is presently working on his solo project, and we will be covering that when it becomes available.

Gabriel Rodriguez, also a bassist and composer, but from South America this time, has an article on something I confess I had never heard of before. The Clave. Maybe you are as clueless as I am in this regards and could benefit from a bit more knowledge in this aspect of the world of bass.

We have some great news also from Taiwan. A young gentleman by the name of Lee-Ping Jiang will be joining us in the months to come, translating articles and interviews into Taiwanese. As well he will be conducting his own interviews from his region. He is the Boardmaster of Taiwan’s largest Discussion Group and a member of a teaching group for bass players in that region. As well, he is developing contacts with Japanese writers who will be working on both translations and interviews.

So as I said earlier, things are truly headed Global! Suffice it to say, that there is not one country in this world that we would not like to hear from, so if you are a writer, professional or amateur, ANYWHERE in the world, that has an interest in the world of bassplayers, just contact me at the e-mail address shown below.

Oddly enough, other than this endless note, I submitted no interviews or articles for this issue of the magazine: quite unusual considering I was the source of most of the interviews and articles in the beginning. I’ve had to wrestle a bit with that, trying to hand the reins over to other writers than myself.  The ego wants to get into the way, but the higher purpose of reflecting our Global credo matters more.

Now don’t think for a second that I won’t be impinging upon you again! I ain’t backing away from this completely, but this has allowed me to turn my attention to other matters, such as the development of some new directions for the magazine. I will certainly continue doing interviews, but my time is better spent now steering us towards a more diverse and world wide magazine.

One of my intentions is to further the magazine’s goal of truly reflecting a world of bass players, setting aside distinct sections within the magazine to reflect various geographic locations of the world. Already as shown earlier, we have covered the U.S., The British Isles, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, South America, Australia and New Zealand and now Taiwan and soon Japan.

Recently I received a note from someone inquiring about advertising in the magazine. I had to laugh when the individual asked if this were only an internet magazine. Yes, only an internet magazine that reaches clear around the globe, receiving 170,000 to 250,000 hits a month, that’s all.

In the future at some point I would like to develop a hardcopy version of the magazine, but right now we are reaching and teaching, learning from and interacting with more people than we could have ever achieved through a hardcopy magazine. Of that, I am truly proud.

That brings me to this last matter:

Marty has drawn my attention to the rather interesting fact that Global Bass is coming up in search engines at the top of, or in second to third position.  More often than not such an accomplishment is due to actually paying to have your URL positioned in these engines. I am pleased to say that in our case, our success comes from you, our readers.

Now we would like to ask a favor of you…

In our journey to develop advertising for the site, advertising revenue that allows this magazine to be totally free to all of you, we must show those advertisers that we are reaching you. Now we don’t want you to visit us hundreds of times just to raise the number of hits to the site. What we would like you to do, however, is tell any of your friends that also play bass to come see what we are doing.  The more unique hits from different individuals we receive, the better.  Also, whenever you are looking to buy or sell anything bass, visit BassStuff Online, with links available from nearly every side panel within our issues.  Consider also the Classifieds that appear from the top of every page. 

Okay, I was wrong, just one more thing and I am gone:  we will be offering T-shirts and baseball caps with the Global Bass logo if you would like to show how proud you are to be a part of what we are all trying to do, bring global bassists together so that the instrument will continue to flourish.  Of course,  you will be helping all of us in a shameless ploy to promote Global Bass so that it may continue.  Look for our ad in next month's issue, possibly even later this month, and start saving up for saving us.

Well, enough groveling and “We’re not worthies!”, let’s get on with it.


Enjoy!



Warren Murchie

Editor

Global Bass

April 1st, 2001

                             

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