Bass Player: Mike Rutherford

When discussing bass playing, it is easy to forget the many bass players are not ‘just’ bass players but wear many hats and Mike Rutherford, as well as playing bass guitar for Prog legends ‘Genesis’, plays guitar and bass pedals and also adds backing vocals. More importantly, Rutherford is primarily a songwriter (Genesis started as a songwriting enterprise and only evolved into a band later in the day). It has always been apparent that Rutherford’s bass playing has been more integrated into the ensemble sound than many of the other bass players featured on this webiste e.g. Chris Squire, Jaco Pastorius, Jeff Berlin etc. This means that many of his bass parts are a lot more subtle and harder to pinpoint in the mix than many of his contempraries.

Jump forward to the land of the internet and the YouTube ‘isolasted bass’ phenomenon! This affords us the opportunity to focus in on bass parts that were often much harder to access. The attached transcription is the bass part to the tune ‘One For The Vine’ from the 1976 album ‘Wind And Wuthering’. You will notice that there are two staves on this transcription. The reason for this was becasue Bilbo wanted to include the wonderful Taurus bass pedal parts (starts at bar 159) that form an important part of the arrangement. Another interesting detail; soem of the bass part was played on an eight string bass so it was intermittently difficult to determine which octave the notes were in. AS most people will not have an eight string, we have tried to keep to the lower note but there may be a couple of passages where this appraoch is inconsistently applied. Neverthelss, it remains an interesting read in terms of counting, with bars of 4:4 interspersed with 5:8, 7:8, 6:4 and 3:4. Keeps us on our toes!!

NB the two bar section on the bass pedal line at bar 78 is an error and those bars should have been on the bass gutiar stave. We havew noticed a couple of other glitches as well so apolgies for that. We will try and repair them when we get a chance.