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Upright Citizens is the podcast where two professional bassists - Bob DeBoo and Reuben Rogers - talk music from the bottom up. Every episode breaks down a real technique, a real recording, or a real story from a career on the road and in the studio, so you walk away with something you can actually put into your hands that day.
Expect deep dives on walking bass lines, swing, groove, and tone, interviews with legendary artists, road stories that are actually funny, and straight talk on practicing and listening better. Whether you play upright, electric, or just love the low end, this is where two bass nerds figure it out.
New episodes monthly, in audio and video.
Upright Citizens - Episode 2
"How to Learn New Music Fast (And Make It Sound Like You've Always Known It)"
Cold Open
BOB: All right — so you've been called to play with musicians you love, and the music is deep and detailed. But you don't have a lot of time to make it come alive before you go on stage. So how do serious musicians who care about the music learn it fast and truly internalize it? Today we're going to show you exactly how, from situations where we had no choice but to figure it out.
BOB: Welcome to Upright Citizens, where two bass nerds share how they think about music from the bottom up.
Intro
BOB: All right, Reuben. What are we here to talk about today?
REUBEN: We're here to talk about how to learn new music fast — or at least how you go about doing it. We may have different ways we go about doing it.
BOB: I can't wait to hear how you do it, because I'm always trying to learn. I know you've got some good tips for me, and we've got some good tips for you as well. But before we do anything else, let's listen to this.
Listen to This: Ulysses Owens — "Better Days"
REUBEN: Got your head bobbing... Feels good, right? Very festive feeling — you're at a party. We were talking about New Orleans earlier — sounds like New Orleans, right? No doubt. Who was that?
BOB: That was Ulysses Owens. It was a song called "Better Days," written by the trumpet player in the band, Anthony Hervey. The bass player on that track is the great Philip Norris, by the way. So that, to me — there was a lot going on in there, and it all felt really organic and natural. It felt like everybody knew what they were playing. Nobody's reading that music while they're playing it to make it feel like that, right? And that brings me a little bit to what we're going to talk about today, as far as internalizing music and how to do that fast.
A Word From Open Studio Pro
If Upright Citizens is all about loving music, Open Studio Pro is all about truly living that musical life. We have live guided practice sessions every week in Open Studio Pro — like the Bass Masters Club and the Bass GPS — to give you new ideas and get feedback to improve your playing the right way. Head over to openstudiojazz.com. That's openstudiojazz.com.
Bob's Story: The Fayetteville Gig
BOB: Now back to the show. The story with this track, for me, is that I got a call a couple years ago from Ulysses Owens to go in the next day — drive from here in St. Louis down to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to play a gig.
REUBEN: How far is that?
BOB: About six hours.
REUBEN: Is that a thing here? You all drive that far for gigs and turn around and go back to your families?
BOB: I did the gig — because it was Ulysses. But here's the rub: I've learned a lot of music. It's just a natural thing we have to do as bass players — any side person has to do it. You get called for a gig, you hopefully get some tracks, maybe some charts, you learn it, and you go to the gig. So the story with this one is that I was actually right here filming a course for Open Studio — Ulysses is an Open Studio artist too, by the way, we have a thing together, "Art of the Swing" — great course, everybody check that out — and I wrapped up the course, took my phone off silent, and had a text from Ulysses: "Hey, can you come do this gig tomorrow in Fayetteville?" I was like, "Man, yeah, of course, let's do it."
It worked out that the flight wasn't going to happen — Philip Norris was stuck in New York because of bad weather and couldn't make the gig. So they were in a pinch, needed a bass player, and I luckily got the call. I said, "Yeah, of course — send me the music." This is 6:00 PM on a Friday, and the gig is Saturday night. I get an email with YouTube clips in it — live shows, sounding great, because they'd been working this music out on the road. And this is all love, Ulysses, when you hear this — I emailed him back and said, "Hey, do you have any charts on this stuff? Some of it's pretty involved." One of the tracks in there was from a live concert they hadn't recorded yet. He said, "Nope — we're old school, no charts." The set was eight or nine tunes. So: no charts, just the audio in the email — and I was grateful to have that.
So what I did was learn it in the car on the drive down to Fayetteville. I had everything up on my iPad — I was driving reckless, one hand on the wheel, the other hand dealing with the tracks, rewind, rewind — but I made it to the gig. I had my tuning fork to get my pitches and figure out what key we're in, and a little piano-on-the-track thing to get some reference. But I was able to learn pretty much the whole set on the drive down. It's not a flex — it's just a way we sometimes have to make this work, to learn new music in a pinch. And I want to share some of the things I learned through that experience and others.
How to Listen
BOB: So let's make sure we're on the same page. Listening — intently, I should say — and repeatedly.
REUBEN: You had that other thing too, the little keyboard.
BOB: The keyboard thing is all about relative pitch if you don't have perfect pitch — even if you do have perfect pitch, it's great to have a tool or a reference to navigate whatever you're hearing. I do that a lot. I'll be on a plane or something — I used to carry around a little MIDI keyboard, but that was too much. Now we're in the 21st century and you can have all that on your phone. That's a great reference for me to know what key it's in, or what notes are being played, to speed up the process of internalizing the music and getting deeper into it.
REUBEN: What else did I miss there? Is there something else?
BOB: If I think about the order of importance for what I'm listening for when I hear a track like "Better Days" — first, I'm listening for the form. Eight-bar sections, twelve, sixteen, whatever it might be. The feel — because even if you have a chart that says "here's the feel," that doesn't always translate, and again, there were no charts for this one. So: form, feel, what's the key, are there any particular lines I need to know — because sometimes we're just thinking chord changes — are there bass lines I need to know, are there hits? We could hear there were a lot of hits in the melody starting off. Thankfully, once it gets to the solos, it's a blues — but for the melody, there was a bit more involved, so I'm feeling that out too. It's never just the tune — it's everything else that makes it special that we want to be aware of.
REUBEN: Right — and the main thing, like we always say, is we want to know just enough — as much as we possibly can about the situation — so that we can also let go of it as much as possible. So we can play, make it feel good.
BOB: Yes — at least in improvisational music. Of course there's plenty of music where it's, "No, that's what you've got to play, you better play that, because that's your part." But in a lot of the contexts we end up playing, people also want you there and want you to bring your personality to it. You can only build from the foundation you've built for yourself in that tune, in that space.
Reuben's Story: The Gerald Clayton Gig
REUBEN: I'd like to go to an experience I had — which is funny, it's just this gig I'm talking about — we were playing opposite Ulysses, actually, with the great Gerald Clayton. I was basically coming into a freight train moving at top speed and had to jump on. Joe Sanders, Justin Brown, and Gerald Clayton have a beautiful trio — great artistry — and they'd done, like, five gigs, and somehow Joe couldn't make the last one. So I had to jump in. Gerald was like, "Yo, here's this music" — and he sent me these tracks, at least the reference I had going in, and I'd like to play them for you and walk you through some of it.
BOB: When you say reference, you were given a certain kind of track, right — MIDI tracks?
REUBEN: Yes — I'm going to play it for you right now.
BOB: Like mock-up things.
BOB: So that's the reference track, right? That's obviously not the recording.
REUBEN: No, not the recording — but a lot of times, at least in my experience, people will just send me that, because maybe they haven't recorded the music yet. They're writing it in Sibelius or whatever and they output the MIDI, and it's left for you to interpret a bit, but you get a gist of what it is. This tune felt familiar to me because I'd seen Gerald's trio play before — I remembered there were some hits, and the way the music had already morphed into a certain kind of thing, I was like, "Where's the time, where is that even." So I went back and did my research — this is part of the best way you can prepare yourself, let's come to that. He called it "More Light" here on this track, but the track I'm about to play is called "A Light." Over time it morphed into this.
BOB: The music evolves, and even the titles can evolve over time.
REUBEN: Exactly. And this is actually what the tune sounds like.
REUBEN: This is an intro that's not even on that MIDI thing.
Deep Listening, In the Moment
BOB: So you're hearing this, doing the work, doing the deep, repeated listening — what's going through your mind as you're prepping, as you're learning this music, Reuben, at this point?
REUBEN: Well, I'm looking at the chart he sent — thankfully, not like your situation — and still, a lot of it isn't making sense to me.
BOB: Sure, because the music has changed a bit, perhaps.
REUBEN: Exactly — it's morphed into a certain thing, they've gotten away from the page. And you have to understand, these musicians played together, they feel time in a certain kind of way. So the main thing I had to do was exactly what you did — but I had more reference. I had audio, and I had a chart. I listened to it over and over and over, and same thing — I didn't have the bass in my hand to do it. So I picked it out a little bit, but I could see visually what the notes were. I was thinking rhythms — there's a lot of rhythm involved — thinking pitches, listening for root movement, singing along with it, imagining playing it. What you probably didn't hear is that what I actually started to latch onto was more of the melody. The hits are going to be there, but that's also what Joe started to do — that was Joe Sanders on bass, by the way, Justin Brown on drums, Gerald Clayton on piano, Dayna Stephens... and I'm forgetting one more person.
BOB: You're listening for the melody as a reference?
REUBEN: Oh yeah — because Joe starts to play a lot of the melody, since he'd been playing it and knows it. I started to listen to more of the melody too, as a reference point — okay, well, this is where the hits are. It was definitely challenging when I was looking at it, counting — "one, two — oh, no, that's not — oh, I'm off." But the other thing is that, as I said, the music had morphed into a whole other thing by the time I went to do the gig — and they knew that too, and that was okay. That's why I was called to do it — bring what you bring. The elasticity. And also not being afraid to mess it up.
BOB: That's a great thing — you have to be realistic going into these situations.
REUBEN: And that brings it back to square one. Obviously we're very fortunate to play with these stellar musicians, but that advice — everything we're saying, but especially that — is probably the biggest thing you can take away, whether you're a beginner or an advanced player. It's okay to mess it up while you're trying to internalize or read music, or listen to something by ear and figure it out. Have grace with that process.
BOB: Amen — absolutely. Have grace with that process, because that's part of it. We're human, and that's part of what we're bringing too. And the only way to really internalize it is — you're going to beat yourself up a little bit sometimes. But don't let that be a crutch, or a crux, to further develop your situation.
REUBEN: Absolutely. So at any level, a non-negotiable takeaway: you have to listen. You have to do deep, repeated listening. And I think it's important — if you're learning a new standard, listening to an old jazz recording and trying to learn the tune — listen for the root movement, listen for the form, listen for the feel. Those are the things you really want to take in at the onset.
Learning From a Person vs. Learning From the Page
REUBEN: Before we close this up, I've got a question for you. Would you say internalizing or learning new music is easier, or better retained, if you learn it from a person — an actual individual?
BOB: From an individual, how do you mean?
REUBEN: As in someone saying, "Okay, here's E-flat," or "here's G-flat," or them just playing the tune and you learning it that way.
BOB: Yes — because this has come up on many a gig, where you learn the tune on the stage. That happens. I think it's stuck with me more because it's more immediate. If I go to the opposite side of that, the way I learn least effectively is looking at a piece of sheet music and trying to internalize it that way. Getting away from the music, getting away from the sheet, is the best way to internalize it. But hearing it from and getting fed it by a musician — even at the gig I was talking about, we played that particular "Better Days," and I had a question: "What is that chord right there?" Because I hadn't quite gotten it. The musicians are always going to help you if you show up and you've done the work — give you a boost, make the music sound better.
REUBEN: The other thing is you have no reference point except the one being fed to you in that moment.
BOB: Absolutely — and that's what counts, in that moment, not what's on the recordings you were sent. So I think that's usually the best way to do it, because you have nothing else.
The Takeaway
BOB: True, absolutely. So if we're breaking this down, the takeaway —
REUBEN: You have to do the listening, you have to do the work.
BOB: Number two — I'm going with mental practice. Mental practice is: if you've got the track, you're imagining yourself being involved in it, playing along with it, because you might not have the luxury. You might be on the road, traveling, literally driving the car with your iPad there trying to figure it out, and you're not going to actually play. That's an okay way to practice and learn new music, because you're still making the same neural connections.
REUBEN: Number three, if you can — play along with the tracks, as best you can. That's taking it to the next step.
BOB: Anything you want to add to the takeaways?
REUBEN: The last thing I'd say — if you can learn it from the source, a physical source, a person, one on one, or a group — that's a really beautiful way to internalize music. Especially if they're the composer. Then you're good.
Close
BOB: Absolutely. So the next time you're handed music and you don't know it and barely have any time to learn it — don't panic. Listen first, sing along with it, practice it away from your bass before you even pick it up. That's how the music gets inside you, instead of just into your fingers.
BOB & REUBEN: We're Upright Citizens. See you next time. Peace.