The TalkingBass Story

This month is the 10th Anniversary of the TalkingBass website/channel and it seems a great time to give you a little background to myself and how I made the transition from a life as a full time professional musician to being a “YouTuber” and creator of the TalkingBass website.

We can also take a look at some ‘behind the scenes’ photos and details as we go!!

In The Beginning

Let’s take a quick look at the events that led to the Talkingbass channel being born. TalkingBass is ‘bassically’ yours truly. So we need to go way back to where it all began….

The Early Days

I began playing bass guitar as a skinny 15 year old school kid way back in 1990. I basically wanted to join a band with some school friends. And yes, that means I began playing because nobody else played it. I pretty much drew the short straw!!

My dad bought me a cheap Westone Thunder Jet (which I still own in it’s highly modded form) and we began playing as a garage band, spending all our time learning rock songs of the day. We barely played any gigs (apart from a birthday party seen below). Just practiced and practiced until we perfected each tune.

1991 and rocking the Extreme cap / Nirvana T-shirt combo!

We all pushed each other into learning tougher and tougher material and I had a personal love for some of the more virtuosic bass players like Billy Sheehan and Stuart Hamm so my playing developed at a pretty fast rate of progress. I also had a love for Classical music so began practicing Bach pieces with a little help from the basic reading skills I’d acquired through organ lessons in prior years.

I would say I was probably a quick learner and spent every waking hour practicing or studying music. In hindsight, some of that practice was a little misguided (I was self taught) but I did develop my technique over the first couple of years to such a level that I could play the majority of pop/rock tunes. My reading, walking bass, harmony knowledge and live experience were all lacking to say the least but I could handle most rock/metal tunes and I was having fun playing. I was a total bass addict!

Music College and a Career In Music

Fast forward to 1993 and I decided to enroll in music college. My technique was at a pretty good standard (for the few years I’d been playing) and I was at a stage of practicing many hours per day. It was dream of mine to become a professional bassist, earning a living as a musician and music college seemed the best stepping stone for achieving that goal.

All in all I spent a total of 5 years studying music before finally graduating Leeds College Of Music with a 1st Class Hons Degree in Jazz. And before you ask: No, the degree (a piece of paper) never directly led to any jobs or gigs. But I had a great time and studied my ass off!

1997 Mark J Smith ‘perfect police mugshot’ Phase

After graduating in 1998, I felt musically burned out so took a job at a software company (we’ll come back to my computing background in a moment!) but it only took about 4 months of depressing office work before I felt that urge to move back into music. So, I left my job to take a post graduate degree at my old music college with a view to networking a little and getting some gigs.

It was during this Post Grad that I befriended a guy you probably all know… Mr. Scott Devine (of Scott’s Bass Lessons). We were the only two bass players on the course and we both looked A LOT different back then. We stayed in touch over the years but, ironically, came to be ‘rival’ brands totally independent of each other and pretty much by accident.

After a couple of weeks, the head of music (my past professor and good friend) asked me to fill in as an emergency teacher at the college. My old bass tutor, who taught many subjects at the college had been taken ill and so I began what would be a two year career in music education.

I had no formal education training and learned on the job. This actually worked out as great training for what would become Talkingbass. I was teaching students of all levels in a variety of different musical subjects: Music theory, music technology, performance, ear training and, of course, bass.

During this stint as a music teacher I was also gigging on a regular basis in a variety of bands and as a reading sideman. In 2000, after two enlightening years at the college, the gigs became such that I was able to quit teaching and work for the next 13 years as a professional bass player.

Playing as a pro musician is hard. The pay is generally bad (compared to a regular office job) and spend your life desperately seeking to fill a diary with gigs that may or may not lead to something better. I played in a whole host of function bands, tribute bands, jazz bands, orchestras, big bands, cruise ship bands and every other kind of band you can imagine. I backed comedians and solo artists. I played in theatres, bars, holiday camps and even car parks. Anything to pay the bills. Some good. Some great. Some terrible.

Cheesing it up on a cruise gig!

In terms of skills, when you embark on a career as a musician it pays to be able to deal with whatever gig is thrown at you. There are hundreds of bass players competing for a limited number of gigs so it works heavily in your favour to develop some essential core skills. It pays to be able to read music to a high level, you need a good ear and repertoire, you obviously need a strong sense of time and groove, you should have a good tone,  your jazz playing should be on point and you need good social skills. The ability to fit into a group situation without causing arguments or other stress is an underrated trait for musicians. Then above all these things, you need to be reliable. It’s pointless having all the skills in the world if you don’t show up on time.

I spent 13 years travelling the world as a ‘muso’ and pretty much loved every minute of it. But then a life changing event occurred that would inadvertently lead to the creation of Talkingbass!

The TalkingBass Years

The Road To TalkingBass

It was 2012, I was working for P&O Cruises as a bass player and my girlfriend (now wife) rang me at sea to tell me she was pregnant.  This was totally unexpected but also amazing news. I saw out the remainder of my contract and Gemma was due to give birth around Christmas time.

However, I still owed a lot of money on credit card debt (don’t buy stupid amounts of gear you can’t afford kids!). So we really needed income and I’d been offered a World Cruise for 4 months starting in January. Even though this would take me away from my new born daughter we agreed that it was the right thing to do.

The morning I left my daughter for 4 months

Leaving my daughter Abigail two days after she was born was awful. It just so happened Abigail had quite a few issues that led to a pretty rough 4 months for Gemma as she cared for her all alone. The four months dragged on for what seemed an eternity and when I finally returned I vowed I would never leave like that again.

This led to a tricky predicament. We were living on the Isle Of Wight. I’m originally from Wakefield in the North of England but had moved to the Island to be with Gem. Even though it’s home to Mark King (of Level 42), the Isle Of Wight is not the best place to be when attempting to forge a decent living as a professional musician. It’s very tourist based so there are many gigs for solo artists and duos in the hotels dotted around the coastal towns but not so much for a bass player looking for regular live or session work.

So, I toyed with the idea of ending my days as a bass player and taking a regular day job. But I did still hold out a little hope for possibly taking some teaching work. Maybe I could take on some private students and maybe a little work in the nearby college (vacancies permitting). Unknown to me at the time, it would be a very pivotal moment in my life as I struggled to negotiate the indecision and choose the correct path forward.

Around June of 2013, after a couple of months in no-man’s-land I finally decided to work on advertising my private bass tuition. I knew there would only be a small number of students to be found on the Isle Of Wight so I conjured up a plan for building up a number of Skype students. This would allow me to work from home alongside my new family and gain students from outside the confines of the Island. Using the internet I could draw students from every corner of the globe…. At least that was my plan.

But how would I advertise my teaching? There are billions of people on Planet Earth but how would they find me? I had a lot of experience in private tuition from back in my ‘city days’ and a couple of years experience as a full time college tutor. But this wouldn’t count for anything if I couldn’t advertise myself. This is where YouTube would become the key to unlocking my future.

By creating a YouTube channel and posting video lessons, I would be able to demonstrate my ‘alleged’ teaching skills and hopefully gain some students. At that point in time, YouTube was a very different animal. The algorithm worked in a very different way and it wasn’t so hard to gain traction in the bass lesson space. My old friend Scott Devine had been posting videos for a couple of years by this point and was on the way to developing what would eventually become SBL. Another friend of mine from the cruising gigs, Geoff Chalmers, was also working with Scott and developing his own brand ‘Discover Double Bass’. The only other bass channels of note were those of MarloweDK, Janek Gwizdala and Tony Grey. So there were a lot less channels competing for views. Of course, I didn’t realise any of this at the time. I simply wanted to post a few basic lessons and gain some Skype students!

TalkingBass Is Born!

I pondered about the name of the channel for quite a well. In the end I decided on TalkingBass since that would allow me to branch out if I wanted to do anything other than lessons (interviews etc.). I knew I would need to create a website so immediately set about purchasing the Talkingbass domains. Unfortunately someone already owned talkingbass.com and was selling it for several thousand pounds on the various domain provider websites. I was pretty broke at that point so decided to go with .net and .co.uk. At least with the .net url I could treat the brand as a ‘network’ of sites in the future. I never did, but at least I was thinking ahead.

After looking at some other channels I also came to the conclusion that I needed a certain ‘look’ for the videos. Most other bass channels were the same: Guy sits in front of an Imac and some Adam speakers recording directly into Logic. I wanted something different that would make me stand out.

I’d already seen a few other channels using that stereotypical Apple ‘infinite white’ backdrop and it looked like a very clean, neutral look. Yes, some people find it hard on the eyes (in hindsight I should maybe have chosen a different colour like grey) but it worked well in providing a brand look and would be great for embedding on web pages.

I set about researching how to create that infinite white look and found it would be hard in such a confined space (I was filming in the kitchen). But I knew I could make it work and bought all of the gear I needed. Unfortunately, we were totally broke and so I made the decision to sell pretty much all the music gear I had, except for a couple of basses. The Fender Jazz and the Ibanez.

This helped to subsidise the TalkingBass setup. I bought a Panasonic video camera, some lighting, a white paper backdrop, a Rode lavalier mic and a Zoom BR16 audio recorder. This setup allowed me to record anywhere in the house without being attached to a computer.

My first recording setup circa July 2013

My first few videos were AWFUL! I released them in early July and have since deleted them. I was terrible on the mic, the backdrop was a mess and I was reaching for an on-screen personality that just wasn’t me. But over time this would change.

I recorded some basic beginner lessons on technique and then decided to create a series of lessons devoted to music theory. This would be specifically aimed at bass players with reference to the fretboard. With a little help from the fledgling Youtube algorithm and some posts I made on the Talkbass forum, I managed to gain some traction with my views and subscriber count.

After a few weeks I created a video providing tips on slap technique. This video was a game changer for me. Instead of the few hundred hits or less I would gain in the opening week of release, this video launched into the thousands of views in the first few days and from that point on the TalkingBass channel began to grow at a much faster pace. Slapping, tapping and technique would help gain some much needed views. All the crazy techniques I’d practiced when I was younger, that had zero application in a professional setting, were now helping to increase my profile. Who’d have thunk it!

And so it came to pass, over a period of several months, I was able to gain a number of private Skype students. At that time, Gemma was earning enough money to pay for our rent and food through her gigs as a singer and I’ll always be indebted to her for keeping a roof over our heads while I built the TalkingBass brand from nothing.

As the number of students increased I was able to share the financial load but I still needed to work on monetization of the brand. Especially if I wanted to improve the standards of the channel and transform TalkingBass into a business that might sustain us in a more stable way in the long term. This would be where some of my other childhood skills would prove to be incredibly useful.

TalkingBass Hits The Web

My dad bought me my first computer some time around 1982. It was a Tandy TRS80 Color Computer with 16K of RAM (8K of usable RAM if you only used BASIC). He planned on his 7 year old nerd of a son (me) learning to code and develop software for automating his workshop machinery. Of course this was never going to happen and guess what…it never did. I did however learn to write BASIC code.

From that point on I developed an interest in computing that I have to this day. I’m not a ‘coder’ by any stretch of the imagination but I did briefly study computer science at college although I dropped out after a year before moving onto the music college. I was OK at writing simple databases in C++ and I learned HTML in the early 90s as a way of creating websites when a crazy new thing called ‘the internet’ appeared for those of us with a working modem. My coding skills were limited even back then and I’m totally unfamiliar with the newer languages. But, I am probably what you might call ‘computer literate’.

How does this relate to TalkingBass? Well, I knew that if I was going to make anything of the TalkingBass ‘brand’ beyond simple YouTube videos, I would need a website. I was still too broke to employ a developer and why would I even bother when I could create a site by myself?

So I set about developing the first version of the TalkingBass website. That first version was VERY different to the site of today. I simply created a main page, a blog (for the sake of SEO ) and I also had a booking page for potential Skype students. The Youtube lessons would also be added to the site as blog posts. This allowed me to provide lesson material and audio tracks for practice at the site.

Once I had the site up and running I would have a basic foundation to build upon with future ideas. By this time, I was earning a tiny amount of revenue from the YouTube ads. It takes a LONG time and a huge number of views to earn anything close to being a minimum wage from YouTube alone. Relying on future gains of YouTube ad revenue is a very bad business plan unless you already have a huge following. However, the small income I was bringing in from ads and private tuition allowed me to spend a little more on recording equipment and invest in the website infrastructure.

Running a YouTube channel and website can run you into a large number of expenses very quickly, especially if your views suddenly increase overnight. Web hosting providers will charge more as your traffic increases. You might start with cheap or free hosting but as the server bandwidth is exhausted through increasing hits, you are quickly forced into more expensive contracts.

TalkingBass is now run on dedicated servers with crazy high specs simply because of the ridiculous amount of traffic. This all adds up to a large expense and if you have no way of your monetizing your site, then you’re doomed to failure. You simply won’t be able to afford the infrastructure necessary to support the increasing numbers. Many consumers of YouTube content don’t understand this conundrum. Clickbait and advertising might seem annoying to us as viewers of, what might seem, free videos on a free platform. But to provide anything beyond that takes raw cash.

So, I had to work on developing some ways of creating income from the site, even if only to keep everything afloat. With this in mind I began educating myself on all forms of internet marketing. This is something musicians struggle with. Creative types tend to always focus on the content/product without thinking too much about the marketing. I knew that I would need a crash course in generating cash if I was going to survive. The traffic was already beginning to cause problems with the site and I would need to upgrade all areas of the hosting in order to handle the higher number of visits.

Mark ‘Twain’ Smith?!

Long before my move into the online space, I had my eyes set on releasing educational books. As a kid, it was my dream to be an author. I spent a large part of the 1980’s writing with the aim of being the next Stephen King. Then as a I moved into music and music education, my writing goals shifted to a dream of publishing music books.

As a total nerd, I had written massive amounts of notes while studying music and reading countless books from the local library. This documenting of my musical development resulted in a huge set of plans I could use for creating books and courses in the future. The courses you now see at the TalkingBass website are largely a result of this planning. The sight reading course was all planned out back in the late 90s. I just never realised it would be presented as an online, multimedia experience.

As I mentioned earlier, I was going to need some form of product to sell on the site if I was going to continue. With this in mind, I wrote two books. The Scale Reference Guide and The Study Book Of Scales. The Scale Reference Guide would be a free ‘lead magnet’ to help with creating an Email list (still there in the ebook Download section of the site) and the Study Book Of Scales would be my first sellable product (The Study Book is now unavailable. The Scale Essentials course took its place).

The original Study Book Of Scales graphic

On the first day of sale, the site crashed over and over again. It was VERY embarrassing. Even a small spike in traffic was enough to hammer the site to its knees and so I spent all night phoning the tech support of the web host (in the Philippines) in an attempt to keep the site live. With the small influx of revenue I gained from the book sales, I was able to upgrade to the next tier of hosting and things would run a little smoother. For a while.

This was the start of my journey into the world of ecommerce and selling of online products. My goals of writing music education packages in book form had shifted. Books are OK. But I figured I could create much better products by combining my newly acquired video production skills with my course plans and love for teaching. Combining all of this with my interest in web development would lead to the site and community you see today.

The Next Step: Courses!

I knew that most players looking for online help would be beginners so it made sense to create a beginner bass guitar course as the first foray into this new venture. I planned out 8 lessons, recorded them, set up a Vimeo account for embedding the video material (another large expense) and in January 2015, using some basic page restrictions, I published my first course: Beginner Bass Guitar. I’ve since updated the video content but the general concept is the same. It’s an introduction to playing bass for absolute beginners at a relatively low price point.

The original Beginner Bass Guitar advertisement

Since that time I’ve created 19 courses. My second course, Bassic Fundamentals, followed on from Beginner Bass Guitar to create a more rounded, in depth, guide to playing for beginners. I then set about addressing a variety of topics I felt would be both important and popular.

The Simple Steps To Sight Reading series is my flagship product. It was a huge undertaking with over 700 pages of written material and 25 hours of video content. That’s more than the Lord Of The Rings, The Godfather and The Hobbit trilogies combined!

The Chord Tone Essentials course is also a personal favourite of mine due to the many lightbulb moments I enjoy providing to the viewer.

Simple Steps To Slap Bass and Chords For Bass Guitar are less academic and more stylistic in nature. But they are obviously areas of playing in which bassists love to dabble.

Over the years I’ve obviously improved as a course creator and developed a more consistent style. I plan on re-recording several of the early courses such as Bassic Fundamentals and Simple Steps To Slap if only to update the look and tone.

I absolutely love course creation. I work alone in this regard so things take time and it can be fairly stressful but I get a huge sense of achievement after releasing the finished product and it’s incredible to read glowing testimonials from those of you that develop skills as a result of working through the course content.

That is why I spend so much time developing the lessons and also the reason the courses tend to be so gargantuan in size. I don’t want to create courses as a means of making a quick buck. They are always designed from a purely educational standpoint. Not a financial one. I suspect most of you in the TalkingBass community are aware of this and it’s perhaps one of the reasons the site has become so successful.

Evolution Of TalkingBass

After creating the first course, the TalkingBass website evolved progressively over time and eventually reached the state of play you see today. Over the years I’ve added and removed several features. The free membership was an early addition. This allowed members to gain access to a variety of free downloads and resources and also provided an ‘account’ system for each user. This would be essential in creating an environment whereby users could login and access their purchased courses.

I also developed several forum systems that always ended badly. Integrating reliable third party forum software was always a challenge and would usually require some form of bridging system to connect them to the legacy database. This would invariably create numerous headaches from a developmental standpoint due to the conflicts arising in the code. The site is a little like a Jenga tower. The site had been developed over such a long period of time that adding or removing any large features can result in the whole thing falling apart.

Eventually, in 2021 I made the decision to totally reconstruct the site in an effort to add the current features you now browse on a daily basis. The members area now operates as a social network that allows for member interaction. I also added a basic app for mobile devices that would allow for a more streamlined experience on smaller screens.

During all of this development, in 2017 I was also finally able to move TalkingBass out of the loft floor of our house and into a studio unit. This was a HUGE step forward and allowed me the freedom to work and record without the distractions of family life. In 2014, Gem gave birth to our second daughter Isabel and working in the house became increasingly difficult alongside screaming children and the distractions that they bring. The unit became an office and a recording studio from which I could work undistracted. This resulted in an exponential growth in productivity that continues to this day.

Moving into the new office in 2017

Obviously, all of this evolution took a huge amount of effort and time. I’ve had very little help over the years and have generally run TalkingBass alone. A lifelong friend of mine (and Best Man at my 2017 wedding) helped with some tech and SEO elements, I’ve had a few freelance workers help with some specialised areas of coding and I now employ the wonderful Ellen O’Reilly as community and social media manager.

You might also know Ellen from the TalkingBass Podcast interviews. She is a great bass player/singer that I first met at the London Bass Show in 2015. As well as columnist and writer for Bass Player magazine, she’s also a standup comedian and as clever as they come, so she’s an invaluable addition to the TalkingBass ‘team’.

Ellen playing at the London Bass Show

But aside from these few important additions, TalkingBass is pretty much a one man operation. Over the years I’ve learned a lot about all aspects of the business and now know that organisation and planning is key to running things smoothly.

However, I have also paid the price for all of the work and dedication required. My mental health has taken a pounding at times, especially while trying to balance the responsibilities of running TalkingBass and those of raising a young family. But after 10 years of building a solid foundation, the business is finally at a level of stability that allows me to breath a sigh of relief and look to the future with a huge amount of positivity.

Thank You For The Last Ten Years!

This 10 year anniversary is a very emotional month for me as I look back on how far TalkingBass has come after starting with absolutely nothing at a time when I was contemplating quitting music altogether.

Ten years ago I never dreamed that I would be building a platform that would allow me to meet my heroes and present interviews with bass players such as Tony Levin, Nathan East and Leland Sklar. It’s been a long road and it would never have been possible without the support from you, the TalkingBass community. Every email I receive from bass players thanking the site for everything we do provides me with the motivation and energy to continue.

So once again, thank you everyone for your continued support over the last 10 Years. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tour through the history of TalkingBass and I hope to provide you many more moments of happiness on your own bass journey over the next ten years!

Mark J Smith (TalkingBass)