Wenzl Hause was the first active bass player to write a method for the instrument, published in its final form around 1825, and he tried to incorporate as many practical elements into it as he could. The second of the three volumes of his method is a book of 90 exercises. That sounds like overkill – until you look at them more closely, at which time you’ll see that some of them aren’t more than half a page long in the original edition. Short, concise, to the point – that seems to have been Hause’s idea, rather than pages and pages of repetitive browbeating. Let’s take a look at one of these exercises, number 20, and see what issues it addresses. The fingerings are Hause’s. Read More