If you choose to work as a touring
bassist, you set yourself up
for several unavoidable situations.
The first is that your gigs will
not always be very glamorous.
The second is that guitarists will
always get the attention. The
third—unless you play for the
Grateful Dead—is you will have
downtime when you aren’t touring.
I can’t help you with the first
two—and the third is not any
easier to address—but you can
use downtime to your advantage.
Touring schedules differ
according to style and region,
but here in Nashville (with some
big-name exceptions), touring
generally slows down from
November through March. I
learned the hard way that touring
schedules don’t stay full all year,
and you have to budget your
touring income accordingly to get
through the leaner months. I can’t
tell you how many guys here in
town buy new gear in May, only
to sell at a loss in December.
There are a lot of variables that contribute to the slowing of touring. The artist may want a break, there may not be any new material to promote, or the shows may just be acoustic promotional shows for radio. For the latter, the artist usually takes only one or two players while the rest of the band sits at home. But fear not, because there are many productive (and sometimes profitable) ways to stay occupied during the slow months.
When I see my calendar is not that busy, instead of counting shows I have, I count the days I don’t have anything planned. I see them as “opportunity days” and begin thinking about all the things I can do on those days off. That’s a reversal of normal thinking. If you do this, you’ll soon realize you can now accomplish those things you put off during your busy season.
Now, during your not-busy season, what are you going to work on? I suggest starting with small goals and then moving on to the more ambitious ones. Do you need to dump those 4-track cassette demos from high school into your new recording software? How is your gear holding up? You could probably clean three layers of state-fair dirt from the inside of your rack. What about your basses? This could be a great time to upgrade some hardware or pickups. Knock out the busywork tasks that are within your grasp, then you can get to the fun stuff.
The fun stuff is making money while doing something that you are probably already doing. The first and most obvious way to make money while not on the road is to take local gigs. They don’t pay nearly as much, and there are probably tons of cover songs to learn, but you can handle it. In Nashville, like many towns, playing locally can open other players’ ears and eyes to you, which may lead to a better gig next year. Lower Broadway in Nashville, a section of downtown famous for its country bars, is sort of the farm system for touring acts. If you can make it there, who knows what could be next?
Teaching is another way to make good use of your time, and I have heard of players taking on 40 or more students during the off-season. That can add up to rent money quickly, and again, you’ll be making money with a bass in your hand. If you are tech savvy, teaching lessons via Skype is becoming increasingly popular, since you don’t have to be in a particular town to have a bunch of students. If you feel your playing isn’t at a level to teach, you could volunteer at a school program and help someone who is just getting started. The checking account won’t necessarily fill up, but your karma bank will.
A moment ago, I mentioned recording software. It seems every musician has some way to get sounds onto a computer. If you are proficient with recording software and tracking your own demos, why not branch out and record other musicians? I am sure there is a songwriter or band in your town in need of such services. Put on your producer/engineer hat and share some of your good ideas with the artists you are working with. Bass players make good producers (I have no scientific data to back this), so if you are working with songwriters, maybe you can lay some bass tracks down for them. Now, not only are you recording someone (and hopefully getting paid), but your bass work is being heard by others. This could very well lead to more studio work.
Why didn’t I mention studio work earlier? Plenty of players here work both in the studio and on the road, but sometimes you have to make a choice. There has been an unwritten rule that studio guys don’t tour and touring guys don’t track. This entrenched system is actually going away, due in part to guys wanting to work as much as they can. In smaller towns, the competition may not be as fierce, so you may have more opportunity to get session work than you know. The best way to “get in” is to start reaching out to producers and letting them know you are going to be home and available for session work. If there is a studio in your area, just reach out to the owner or engineers and provide them with the best samples of your work. If you don’t have anything recorded, this is a great time to put together a demo.
Remember, just because you have to look for other things to keep yourself busy or find other sources of income, it does not take anything away from your musicianship or your place in the universe. And you don’t have to be a full-time musician to take advantage of these suggestions. If you have time and want to get into some different musical ventures, there’s nothing stopping you. If you are in a van while reading this, make some notes of things you want to do when you get home. Then fill those holes in the calendar by working when you aren’t working!
Steve Cook is currently
fortifying himself
in the back of a tour
bus, awaiting the low-end
revolution. He can
be reached at info@shinybass.com until the
coast is clear.
Valerie June’s songs, thanks to her distinctive vocal timbre and phrasing, and the cosmology of her lyrics, are part of her desire to “co-create a beautiful life” with the world at large.
YouTube
If you’re familiar with June’s sound, you know how effortlessly she stands out from the singer-songwriter pack. Her equal-parts warm, reedy, softly Macy Gray-tinged singing voice imprints on her as many facets as a radiant-cut emerald—and it possesses the trademark sincerity heard in the most distinctive of singer/songwriters. Her music, overall, brilliantly shines with a spirited, contagiously uplifting glow.
Owls, Omens, and Oracles opens with “Joy, Joy!” with producer M. Ward rocking lead guitar over strings (June plays acoustic on nearly all of the tracks and banjo on one). It then recurringly dips into ’50s doo-wop chord changes, blends chugging, at times funky rock rhythms with saxophones and horns, bursts with New Orleans-style brass on “Changed” (which features gospel legends the Blind Boys of Alabama), and explores a slow soul groove with electronic guest DJ Cavem Moetavation on “Superpower.” Bright Eyes’ multi-instrumentalist Nate Walcott helmed the arrangements with guidance from Ward and June, and frequently appears on piano and Hammond organ, while Norah Jones supports with backing vocals on the folk lullaby “Sweet Things Just for You.” The entire album was recorded live to tape, which was a new experience for June.
June shares her perspective on the album and her work, overall. “It’s not ever complete or finished, your study of art,” she offers. “It’s an adventure, and it keeps getting prettier as you walk through the meadow of creating or learning new things. Every artist that you bring in has a different way of performing with you, or the audience might be really talkative or super quiet. And all of that shapes the art—so it’s ever-expansive. It’s pretty infinite [laughs], where art can take you and where it goes.... I kinda got lost there a little bit,” she muses, laughing.
June’s favored acoustic guitar is this Martin 000-15M, with mahogany top, back, and sides.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
June didn’t connect with guitar in the beginning, but discovered her passion for it later, when the instrument became a vehicle for her self-empowerment. She took lessons as a teenager but was a distracted student, preferring to listen to her teacher share the history of blues guitarists like Big Bill Broonzy and Mississippi John Hurt. “I didn’t pick it up again until I was in my early 20s, and my band that I was in with my ex fell apart,” she says. “I still was singing and I still was hearing these beautiful voices sing me these songs, and I didn’t want to never be able to perform them. It was a terrible feeling, to be … musically stranded.
“And I was like, ‘Now, I could go get a new band and get some more accompaniment, but how ’bout I get my tail in there and keep my promise to my granddad who gave me that first guitar and actually learn how to play it, so I’ll never feel like this again.’ The goal was that I would never be musically stranded again.”
She became a solo performer, learning lap steel and banjo along with guitar, and called her style “organic moonshine roots music.” Today, she eschews picks for fingers, even when strumming chords, and is a vital blues-and-folk based stylist when she lays into her playing–especially in a live,solo setting. After two self-released albums, 2006’s The Way of the Weeping Willow and 2008’s Mountain of Rose Quartz, she connected with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who recorded and produced her 2013 album, Pushin’ Against Stone, at Nashville’s Easy Eye Sound, which helped launch her now-flourishing career.
Valerie June’s Gear
Guitars
Amps
- Fender Deluxe Reverb
Effects
- TC Electronic Hall of Fame
- MXR X Third Man Hardware Double Down booster
- J. Rockett Audio Archer boost/overdrive
Strings
- D’Addario XL Nickel Regular Light (.010–.046)
- Martin Marquis Silked Phosphor Bronze (.012–.054
Photo by Travys Owen
As we talk about art being a shared experience, June says she can be a bit of a hermit at times, but “when it’s time to share the art, then there you are. Even if you’re a painter and you just put your painting on a wall and walk away, that’s an interaction that brings you out of your studio or your bedroom to understand this whole act of co-creating—which to me is a spiritual act anyway. That’s why we’re here, to really understand those rules and layers to life. How do we co-create together?
“And I think it’s so fun,” she enthuses. “I enjoy learning, even when it’s hard. I’m like, ‘Okay, this chord is killing me right now, or this phrase.... but I’ma stick with it. And then that likens to something that I might face when I go out into the world. I’m like, ‘All right, I can get through this.’”
I suggest, “When you say ‘co-creating,’ it sounds like you mean something bigger.”
“Both in the creation of our art, but also in the creation of a life,” June replies. “’Cause how can a life be something this artistic? You get to the end of it and you’re like, ‘Wow, look at what I co-created! With all these other people, with animals, with nature, with sound that’s all around....‘ All of my life has been a piece of art or a collective creation. I imagine them like books: different lives on a shelf. And you go pick one—‘Whoa! I created a pretty fun one there!’ or, ‘Oh, man, I had no hand in that....’ Close the book, next one!” she concludes, laughing as she illustrates the metaphor with her hands.
“So does that make all of your inspirations your co-creators?” I ask.
Valerie June at one of her several Newport Folk Festival appearances, with her trusty Gold Tone banjo
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
“Yeah! Even if they’ve gone before,” says June. “I was listening to some beautiful classical music the other day, and I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know who any of these artists are; they’re all dead and gone, but I’m just enjoying it and it’s putting me in a zone that I need to be in right now.‘ So, we’re always leaving these little seeds for even those who are coming after us to be inspired by.”
Some of her current non-musical co-creators are poets and authors, such as the poet Hafez, the philosopher Audre Lorde, poet Mary Oliver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist whose works include Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.
“It’s not ever complete or finished, your study of art. It’s an adventure, and it keeps getting prettier as you walk through the meadow of creating or learning new things.”
“These books are so beautiful and show the relationship of humanity with nature and the way trees speak with each other; the way moss communicates to itself,” June explains. “Those ways of being can help humans, who always think we know so much, to learn how to work together better.”
As she’s sharing, I see her glance out her window. “Right now, I just saw a muskrat go across the pond,” she continues. “It’s about this big [holds hands about three feet apart] and it digs holes in the yard. It’s having such a great time and I’m just like, ‘Okay, you are huge, and I’m walking through the yard and falling in holes because of you [laughs]. I’m just watching you live your best life!’ And then there was a blue heron that came yesterday, and I watched it eat fish.... They’re my friends!” she exclaims, with more laughter.
Valerie June believes in the power of flowers–and all living thing–as her creative collaborators.
It might seem like we’re getting a bit off subject, but it’s residents of nature like these who are important in her creative process.
I share how, in my own approach to art, I feel as though we can always access creativity and our ideals, as long as we stay receptive to experiencing and sharing in them. June agrees, but comments that sometimes her best self only wants to sit and focus: “No more information; no more downloads, please.”
An encounter with Memphis-based blues guitarist Robert Belfour, who June frequently saw perform, expanded that perspective for her. She shares about a time she went up to him after a show: “I was like, ‘Hey, I would love to work with you on some music and maybe we could co-write a song or something.’ He was like, ‘Nope! I don’t wanna do it.’ And I said, ‘Whaaat?’ And he’s like, ‘No. I do what I do, and I do not do what anybody else does; I just do what I do.’”
Sometimes, she says, “I think that’s just as much of an outlook to have with creating as anything. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m there, I’m where I wanna be. I don’t want to be anywhere else.’”
“That’s why we’re here, to really understand those rules and layers to life. How do we co-create together?”
Part of what’s so enjoyable about speaking with June is realizing that she truly exists on her own plane. She has no pretense, and in that, doesn’t hide some of the fears that weigh on her mind at times. But she doesn’t let those define her. It’s her easy, exuberant optimism that sparks a feeling of friendship between us, without having known each other before that afternoon. What are some of her guiding principles as an artist, I wonder?
“I sit with the idea of, ‘Who am I creating this for?’” she says, “and returning to the fact that I’m doing this for me, and, as Gillian Welch said, ‘I’m gonna do it anyway even if it doesn’t pay.’ This is what I wanna do. And reflecting on that and letting that kind of be my guiding force. It’s just something that I enjoy, that I really wanna do.”
YouTube It
From there, the conversation meanders in other directions, and June even generously asks me a few questions about my own artistic beliefs. We share about trusting your gut instinct, and walking away from situations and people who don’t serve us. This reminds her of a bigger feeling.
“With everything that these times hold for us as humans,” she shares, “from the inequality that we face to the environmental change, the political climate, and all the things that could lead us to fear or negativity.... I started to think about it, and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, maybe we are fucked! Maybe the planet is going to eject us and all of the other things are gonna come true! Well, if that’s what’s gonna happen, who do I wanna be?’
“I want to go out in a way that’s sweet or kind to other people, enjoying this experience, these last moments, and building togetherness through music. I want to co-create a beautiful life even in the face of all of that. That’s what I want to do.”
PRS Guitars today released the updated MT 15 and the new Archon Classic amplifiers, along with a larger Archon speaker cabinet. The 15-watt, two-channel Mark Tremonti signature amp MT 15 now features a lead channel overdrive control. An addition to the Archon series, not a replacement, the 50-watt Classic offers a fresh voice by producing retro rock “classic” tones reminiscent of sound permeating the radio four and five decades ago. Now twice the size of the first Archon cabinet, the Archon 4x12 boasts four Celestion V-Type speakers.
MT 15 Amplifier Head
Balancing aggression and articulation, this 15-watt amp supplies both heavy rhythms and clear lead tones. The MT 15 revision builds off the design of the MT 100, bringing the voice of the 100’s overdrive channel into its smaller-format sibling. Updating the model, the lead channel also features a push/pull overdrive control that removes two gain stages to produce vintage, crunchier “mid gain” tones. The clean channel still features a push/pull boost control that adds a touch of overdrive crunch. A half-power switch takes the MT to 7 watts.
“Seven years ago, we released my signature MT 15 amplifier, a compact powerhouse that quickly became a go-to for players seeking both pristine cleans and crushing high-gain tones. In 2023, we took things even further with the MT 100, delivering a full-scale amplifier that carried my signature sound to the next level. That inspired us to find a way to fit the 100's third channel into the 15's lunchbox size,” said Mark Tremonti.
“Today, I’m beyond excited to introduce the next evolution of the MT15, now featuring a push/pull overdrive control on the Lead channel and a half-power switch, giving players even more tonal flexibility to shape their sound with a compact amp. Can’t wait for you all to plug in and experience it!”
Archon Classic Amplifier Head
With a refined gain structure from the original Archon, the Archon Classic’s lead channel offers a wider range of tones colored with gain, especially in the midrange. The clean channel goes from pristine all the way to the edge of breakup. This additional Archon version was developed to be a go-to tool for playing classic rock or pushing the envelope into modern territory. The Archon Classic still features the original’s bright switch, presence and depth controls. PRS continues to stock the Archon in retailers worldwide.
“The Archon Classic is not a re-issue of the original Archon, but a newly voiced circuit with the lead channel excelling in '70s and '80s rock tones and a hotter clean channel able to go into breakup. This is the answer for those wanting an Archon with a hotrod vintage lead channel gain structure without changing preamp tube types, and a juiced- up clean channel without having to use a boost pedal, all wrapped up in a retro-inspired cabinet design,” said PRS Amp Designer Doug Sewell.
Archon 4x12 Cabinet
As in the Archon 1x12 and 2x12, the mega-sized PRS Archon 4x12 speaker cabinet features Celestion V-Type speakers and a closed-back design, delivering power, punch, and tight low end. Also like its smaller brethren, the 4x12 is wrapped in durable black vinyl and adorned with a British-style black knitted-weave grill cloth. The Archon 4x12 is only the second four-speaker cabinet in the PRS lineup, next to the HDRX 4x12.
PRS Guitars continues its schedule of launching new products each month in 2025. Stay tuned to see new gear and 40 th Anniversary limited-edition guitars throughout the year. For all of the latest news, click www.prsguitars.com/40 and follow @prsguitars on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, X, and YouTube.
Every limited-edition pack also gives players a chance to win a Martin 000-EC 30th Anniversary guitar--a beautifully crafted instrument with a retail value of $4,999, inspired by the Martin guitars Eric played during his legendary MTV Unplugged performance. The guitar will be awarded to one lucky winner who finds a special ticket inside a pack of strings.
Fans can also enter a second-chance giveaway online for more opportunities to win exclusive prizes, including a Martin guitar strap, poster, collectible lanyard with three custom patches, or even a year's supply of strings.This contest is open to U.S. residents only and ends March 31, 2026. No purchase necessary.
Enter now and learn more at martinguitar.com/eric-clapton-giveaway.
The anniversary release also coincides with the upcoming arrival of Unplugged: Enhanced Edition on vinyl and CD, available May 9. The iconic installment of the MTV Unplugged series--and the greatest-selling live album of all time--returns over 30 years later in an all-new extended, remixed, and remastered version. Featuring never-before-heard commentary from Eric recorded just before the original 1992 performance, the release offers fresh insight into the inspiration behind the songs and includes tracks not featured in the original MTV airing.
Crafted from 92/8 phosphor bronze, Clapton’s Choice Signature Strings are known for their warm, rich tone, smooth feel, and long-lasting performance. They're the same strings Eric uses in the studio and on stage--including during his current eight-night residency at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo--and he calls them "the sound that I demand."
Whether you're chasing Eric's iconic tone or simply looking for strings that deliver great sound and playability, now is the perfect time to pick up a pack--available in a music store near you or online at
martinguitar.com--and celebrate two decades of signature sound.
