Who knew 9 over 11 was so hard?!

I had to go back to basics to play this lick...

There will be a podcast episode tomorrow going into way more depth about the situation I’m going to reference today, but here’s the quick version.

Tuesday I get a call from Pat Mastelotto (drummer of Mr. Mister and King Crimson) saying Tony Levin is sick and might not make the Stickmen tour they’re about to start on Friday. Would I be available for the tour? Could I learn all the music by Thursday?

I say no problem learning the music, but I can’t leave on a 20 date tour as I only just got back a few days earlier from a Vital Information tour on the east coast. However, the Stickmen tour started in LA with three nights at the Baked Potato, so I could at least do those dates to help them out.

Again, there’s lots more to the story, including the mind-boggling (to me at least) notion that I’m going to be subbing for one of my bass heroes in essentially his own band… but the podcast will do that much more justice tomorrow.

I want to let you behind the scenes here about a very specific element of what it took to learn this incredibly complex music in less than 48 hours.

There were no charts. I’m not sure they’ve ever really written anything down, at least not in a form that would allow an outsider to interpret the music from a sigh-reading standpoint. So I’m furiously charting the music out and I get to “Cusp”. Markus (Reuter - touch guitar player in the band) informs me that Tony plays the melody on this one and he plays the bass parts…

As you can see, there aren’t too many components to the composition, but lining them all up, keeping track of the form, and playing a riff in 9 over the pulse of 11 proved to be quite the challenge and it sent me right back to basics to make it work.

When you play the repetitious figure starting in bar 3 on its own, it’s really not that hard. It has its own pulse, shape, and pattern which, when isolated, you would think is one of the easiest parts of the song to learn. But as soon as you introduce any other meter around it, even if it’s just an unaccented quarter note metronome to practice to, it starts to reveal itself as a bit of a pain in the ass. Especially when you need to have it buried in your muscle memory in less than 48 hours.

My brain shot right back to 2018 when we released the “Bass Player’s Ultimate Chop Builder” series. I had been thinking about this skill while writing those books. The importance of being able to play things across the bar line, and be comfortable with all manner of odd note groupings against a steady pulse.

As I was sitting at my desk failing miserably at learning “Cusp”, I dove for the bookshelf and grabbed the Minor Modes chop builder book, and looked up Exercise 10.

This is a 7-note phrase over a 4/4 meter. I chose this one to play for 20 minutes or so because I knew I was a little more familiar with moving 7 around over the bar line, and I wanted to re-boot that muscle of superimposing one thing over another before getting back to Cusp with 9 over 11.

The Chop Builder books (Which also have bass TAB if you don’t read standard notation) work on taking a phrase and moving it through each scale degree of the key center. With exercise 10 above, you can see that every 7 notes the phrase moves to the next scale degree, ensuring you play the idea in each mode of the given scale.

The phrase in “Cusp” is static, so moving it through modes wasn’t necessary, but playing exercise 10 for 20 minutes really help loosen my brain up a little and get me out of the wrong headspace of over thinking things.

I then grabbed just the first 7 notes of exercise 10 and played them against a metronome that was in 4 with the first beat of the bar accented. Next, I added two notes to the phrase to bring it in line with the “Cusp” lick, and played that against the four. And finally, I expanded the metronome to 11 beats with beat one accented, and tried to feel the much bigger phrase of an entire bar while I played the riff in 9.

Then of course, it was time to transfer all that work over the song itself, and see if I could start to feel the entire bars of 11 while I played the much shorter riff in 9.

THIS WAS NOT EASY!

I definitely struggled, and it took some hours to feel comfortable with it. I’d also be lying if I said I absolutely nailed it every single time on the shows. We had 6 full shows in 3 days, and I’d say the first show was a C, second show a B+ and by show 3/night 2 I was totally there and playing it accurately every time.

So there’s the short-ish version of how playing 9 over 11 isn’t easy, how I go about slowing down and simplifying the process to accelerate learning, and how I try as hard as I can not to beat myself up about mistakes and make sure I’m always learning from them.

If you want to challenge yourself both rhythmically and harmonically, the Chop Builder books are a great place to start. Like I said, they come with standard notation and TAB, plus videos to help you figure out the best figurings and positions to play all the examples in. Both books are currently bundled together to save you almost 20%. Signed physical copies are also available!

More soon,

Janek