[Bass Community Feature] Pete O’Neill: “Sugar”

Welcome to the first ever featured post here on Mastertemps Bass Blog! I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time, and I’m thrilled to kick it off with New York-based Pete O’Neill, a professional bassist, guitarist, and educator with a passion for songwriting and arranging for solo bass.

Pete’s solo performances have been featured on notreble.com, forbassplayersonly.com, and Smart Bass Guitar. In addition, he’s also had multiple television and commercial appearances.

Currently, he can be seen performing as a soloist, providing bass lines in many premiere studios, and playing such venues as Rockwood Music Hall, Mercury Lounge, and the Knitting Factory with his band the Good Morning Nags and many other acts.

Pete recently shared his latest video with me. Here’s his original song “Sugar,” composed for solo bass.

I asked him about his approach to songwriting and the techniques used in this tune. Here’s what he had to say:

“After seeing Michael Manring perform “The Enormous Room,” I knew that I wanted to explore harmonics as a way to enrich the tonality and extend the range of the solo bass ideas I was exploring. For me however, I felt it was really important to learn harmonics in standard tuning so that I could also incorporate them into my ensemble work and improvisation. That’s where the melody for “Sugar” came from. Once I saw Victor Wooten do “Amazing Grace” I had  some ideas about how to add a bass line and a bit of percussion to the track. I think these two songs are my two biggest influences reflected here.”

Big thanks to Pete for sharing this – well done! Be sure to find him across the web on YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, as well as his website www.peteoneillbass.com.

I’d love to publish more guest posts, so I encourage you to leave a comment below if you enjoyed this one. Thanks for reading!