Imagine showing your students a totally different way of playing the bass, that is still based on the same principals and positions they are learning. See them get motivated by understanding they can play whatever they want and however they want, with what they acquire by their work on classical repertoire.
After conducting more and more Middle Eastern double bass workshops to students of all levels, I see it helps them in so many different ways.
Letting them experience with eastern positions for playing quarter tones is actually having them have names for the notes between the notes they are usually trying to play, notes that up until now were just ‘mistakes’… The different kind of sound production this music requires allows direct experimenting with different bowings and made the students search for new sonorities and musical expression means on their own.
33 seconds from a workshop, July 2011: