The Rush Bass Anthology – published by Warner Bros/IMP – features the bassline to 20 Rush tunes in music notation and tab in a 140 page soft bound book.
The complete song list is:-
Closer to the heart
Cold Fire
Distant Early Warning
Dreamline
Freewill
LA Villa Strangiato
Limelight
New World Man
Presto
Red Barchetta
Roll the Bones
Show Don’t Tell
The Spirit of Radio
Test for Echo
Tom Sawyer
The Trees
2112 Overture/Temples of Syrinx
Working Man
YYZ
Zanadu
Each transcription comes with chord symbols so as well as using the transcriptions to learn the tunes you can also examine the basslines to see what kind of note choices Geddy makes so that you can devise your own exercises to come up with your own basslines!
The transcriptions range in difficulty level from relatively simple (eg Dreamline, The Trees) through some rocking 16th note workouts (Show Don’t Tell, 2112) to the downright bloody difficult! (Free Will, La Villa Strangiato, YYZ) – on a couple of the tunes I’ve worked on there somes to be some minor errors, but on the whole the transcriptions seem accurate.
Conclusion
This book is a relatively inexpensive (and time saving!) way to work on some of Geddy Lee’s basslines.
If you can master the majority of the basslines in this book your own bass playing will definitely improve. However time spent on working out some of Geddy’s approaches to playing (eg rhythms favoured, approach to chord changes etc) will be just as useful to your overall bass development.
My only criticisms of the book – which probably seem a bit petty – are:
1) Inclusion of tab – personally I’d prefer just to have the notation so that there’s more bars of music per page!
2) Song choices – if you’ve checked out my Geddy Lee page you’ll know that my preference is for Rush from Moving Pictures and before. I’d have liked to see transcriptions of tunes like Bastille Day, Anthem, Something for Nothing, the rest of 2112, etc etc.
3) The book would be more user friendly in spiral bound format (this is a beef with most commercially published bass books) – the best way of actually USING the music in the book unfortunately is to photocopy the pages I’m working on and put those on my music stand. (But copying even one tune ruins the spine of the book).
4) Absence of melody lines. Another minor peeve, Geddy Lee’s lines are very melodic and it would have been nice when analysing some of the tunes to have the melody line as a reference point.
These minor quibbles aside, you should get this book and start working on your Geddy lee impression right now!
