Yet he has never really considered himself either a jazz- or prog-rocker. He no doubt could.
PS: Even if you mute the vid and just watch Holdworth's fretting hand, you know that he is in a league of his own. Some people just look skillful.
To my eternal chagrin, I never do!
It used to bug me endlessly as a young man. Some idiot would say: "
Your bassist, eh, he's not doing too much, is he?" And it was all (I was actually a busy player, just stayed in one place much of the time) because I had been taught by a jazz rock bassist who was adamant:
"Don't jump about on the fretboard, Uwe, you have four strings, four long fingers and 90% of all the notes you need are within reach for you, besides the bass is more tonally true the longer you leave the string when fretting und there is less string noise too!"Consequently, I spent the first five to ten years of my bass playing either below the 7th fret or - Glenn Hughes, yes! - above the 12th fret!
Now, in the sundown of my rock star career, I actually play a lot between the 7th and the 12th fret, no doubt because I am now covering Rolling Stones - und that is where old "small hands" Bill made all his money too. I had an interesting experience yesterday at the rehearsal: After half a dozen rehearsals where I had only played a flatwound-strung short-scale vintage LP Junior (in TV yellow, so it looks better on our copious artsy black & white vids we do), I played my Yamaha Billy Sheehan Sig with Sheehan's Rotosound sig strings (just for the heck of it, it stood in the rehearsal rack). But whatever I did with it - it's a fine bass -, it didn't sound right. Stones music doesn't require a bass with an authoritative voice (as you would expect, the Yamaha is designed to take no prisoners), it needs something that sort of "mumbles around" liberally and rather unperturbed in the background!
