Daniel Fox.
Working Denver musician. Bass is my main instrument. I teach what I actually play.
The playing comes first. The teaching comes from it.
Bass is my main instrument, electric and upright, and I think like a bass player no matter what I'm holding: lay down the low context, the root and the structure, so everyone else has something to stand on. Around the bass I play guitar, drums, and piano, and I track and produce music in Logic.
Right now the gigging life looks like this: a flamenco band that plays regularly at Monarch Casino in Black Hawk, and jazz duo, trio, and quartet work, depending on how we're getting booked. Along the way it's been pop punk, Americana, funk, 90s-inspired jazz fusion, grunge, singer-songwriter projects, and jazz pop.
A lot of my education happened as the hired gun. Bands are fun, but the material is often simpler and narrower than what you're asked to do when you sit in with a band whose style you don't know. I've shown up and played full gigs with bands I'd never met, because their bassist had babysitting duty. I learned more on those nights than almost anywhere else, and what I learned there is what I teach.
Two teachers trusted me with their students.
Fox Lessons started when Jordan Lovinger and Gavi Torres handed me their student books. They're both great players. Jordan is a multi-instrumentalist, and Gavi is one of the best jazz fusion guitar players in town. Both trusted me to teach their students. That trust is the standard I hold every lesson to.
My training, honestly.
Jazz band in high school and college. Private lessons on guitar. Self-taught on bass and drums. Piano training as a young child that I'm told happened. No conservatory degree, and I won't pretend otherwise.
Most of my actual skill comes from how I've developed my ability to listen and implement what I hear. That's exactly what I teach: how to listen, so you can bypass unnecessary complications and steps while you learn the music you love.
Students get me as a coach as much as a teacher. We find what you actually care about, we point the lessons at it, and my feedback tracks your goal: light if you're in it for fun, direct if you're chasing a deadline.
If you're coming back to music after years away, so did I. The adults page has that story in full.
We were made for this.
There's something that music does to somebody's brain, to their heart, to their physiology as they play it. There's a beauty in learning to make tones and sounds and express yourself in the language of song. It's a beauty that, for many, is more important than money or love or material wealth. It's something that we're born into this life wanting to get out of us, wanting to say. There's no other way to say it. It's only the tones and the notes and the phrases and the songs that we were put here to express. Whether that's soloing over a Miles Davis song or playing Sum 41 or Nirvana or writing our own music and singing it. We were made for this. We know that if we don't say it, a part of us is going to stay dormant, maybe not die, but we're not going to have the fulfillment and find the spark, the art, and the beauty of life that we would if we really embrace this.
If some part of that is you, come play.