Requiem for Bass in Three Parts

Or should that be a Threnody?

This is my new purchase. A very second-hand bass.

It's a Core Evl Z4b, which aren't cheap ... unless they've been run over by a car. Which is what happened to this one.

It's fixable though. My wife is itching to have a go a repairing it, but has some other guitar projects to finish first, like that nice M.Suzuki acoustic we got the other day ...

Two Bass Git

Some friends have lent me a double bass to play with, as they don't use it during the summer. I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

It is a very different beast to the wee electric bass I own. No frets for a start, and it's damn large.

It's so much fun to play, though. The Star Wars Imperial March sounds so right on the upright. In a wrong sort of way. I'm working my way through some Jazz Walking lessons on it at the moment.

Soon I'll be a Three Bass Git, as I managed to get a cheap acoustic bass on a TradeMe action. It was a great way to break my online auction virginity. Now I'm hooked ... curse you, whoever you are that outbid me on the H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu book.

Another struggling bass player ...

I have many online identities. In Puzzle Pirates I was the first mate for the Extremely Happy Pirates ... a great group of virtual people. In World of Warcraft I'm Gunwallace the Holy Priest, and Klauw the Feral Druid. In Trophy Manager I'm the manager and coach of Spleenpool FC ... go Spleens! I've been a caveman, a feudal lord, a Greek dictator, a medieval peasant, and a meathead berserker.

Perhaps the strangest of my online alter-egos is Essence Tebbitt, a struggling 16 year-old, female ambient electronica artist. The game is Popmundo, and only takes a few minutes a day. You role-play a musician, and strive to gain a foothold in the charts. Obviously, by choosing the Jah Wobble meets Brian Eno style of music I'm not aiming for superstardom with Essence. I'll settle for a niche following. Maybe a couple of groupies.

Popmundo usually has a few thousand people online at any given moment, and they have a weekly online newspaper. The newspaper accepts comic strips, so I conned a friend of mine to draw some strips. We are going to submit the first one this week.

Just a hint of drool

No time for writing today, because, ironically, I'm off to a writer's group meeting. I was worried that this group had disbanded, but it turned out to be an impromptu sabbatical. I'm the young one of the group, and the only one writing comics. I'm not sure what the others make of my stuff, but they haven't asked me to leave yet.

I woke up this morning (always a good start to a blues song) with a fully formed story plot in my head (not such a good blues line in the continuation). I woke up this morning with a fully formed story plot in my head (blues rule: always repeat the first line). So I sat at my computer, and typed 'til my fingers bled (not true, but it rhymes).

It is true about the story plot though. It will be a long one, so I'll file it under ideas for another day. Short things for now. Lots and lots of short stories.

Here's a picture a friend just sent me that serves as visual proof of my bass playing. Yes, that's a short, 30" bass, a Squire Bronco, but I have short, squat fingers. I just realized I play the bass the same way I write; with two fingers.

Don't slip on the wet spot by the bass player

When I was a wee lad I wanted to learn how to play the guitar. I had visions of searing guitar solos before packed houses of adoring fans. My parents got me a decent, cheap acoustic guitar and found me a music teacher. I hated it.

The teacher was an elderly woman who smoked like a chimney. She also had eyesight issues, and would often light the filter end of her cigarette ... which surprised me by actually smelling worse than her normal cigarette smell. She was a piano teacher by trade, but we lived in a small rural area, so she taught all instruments. I don't think she liked the guitar ... or children.

I did stick at it for a while, but my rock star dreams were dashed by three-string chords and endless run-throughs of The Chimes of Westminster and Yankee Doodle Dandy (I had the full anglo-american range of boring tunes available to me).

For many a year I ignored musical instruments ... although I could always pick up a guitar and play Old MacDonald if pressed. That was seared into my neurons.

Then, a year and a half ago, my wife indulged my latent rock star dreams by getting me a bass guitar for my birthday. I like the bass. The strings are a good distant apart from each other, which suits my stubby fingers. I've always played air bass to a large numbers of songs. And I like the complete lack of expectation people have of bass players. If a bass player can stand upright, not drool too much, and keep a reasonable rhythm, well that seems to be enough to satisfy most people.

I've bypassed the fear I have of a music teacher by trying to teach myself as much as possible, and then asking friends who play guitar and know more about music that I do to help fill in the wide gaps in my development. The web is a vast, confusing source of advice and lessons. I'm working my way through studybass.com at the moment, as it promises to tell me how to understand what the root of a chord is.

I have noticed a sort of hierarchy of music lessons. If you want to play a rock or blues tune then there's usually a tab out there for you. Tab is a cheats form of music notation that reduces everything to ... put a finger here and hit the string to make a noise. Here's an example, the bass line to Once in a Lifetime ...

G-------------------------------------------------------
D-------------------------------------------------------
A-------------------------------------------------------
E----0---0------5---5---------------5---5----2---2--

The tab doesn't give you much in the way of timing ... it is just assumed you know the song and can work it out. I raced home from seeing David Byrne in concert earlier this year (Byrne doing Eno related numbers ... I was in heaven) and looked this up. Was it really as simple as it had seemed? I spent large parts of that concert staring at the bass player (left-handed, and very talented).

Anyway ... my point is that if you want to try to play bass to a rock/pop/heavy metal/blues song there's an easy cheat out there in cyberspace for you. If you want to play jazz bass lines, and I really do, then it gets a little trickier. There are a few tabs out there ... but jazz is an improvisational style, and so it does not lend itself to cheats as well.

Instead, when you try to get the web to help you play jazz it throws theory at you ...

1st note of the walking line should be the root (for now) of the chord, the second and third note should be parts of the chord, or chromatic neighbor tones that lead to the 4th note, which leads into the 1st note of the next chord- repeat.

This may make sense to some people ... but I just revert to standard bass player behavior and drool with a slackened jaw. Du ... eeeeh (drip) !

So it's back to virtual school for me ... I'm not going to be beaten by jargon. Heck, I read Foucault and Derrida when I was at university ... this can't be that bad. Can it? Hmm, maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle ... minimalism might be the way to go ... one note ... wait ten seconds ... repeat. Once again post-modernism shows us the way. But the way to where? How do I get back? It's dark, cold and I'm alone. Nooooooooo!

Rockin' and a Reelin'

My wife got me a bass guitar for my (mumble-mumble) birthday. I try to play every day, even if it's just a couple of riffs. At the same time she got herself an acoustic guitar. We don't play together as much as we would like, as usually one of us is looking after the kids. But we both like to hear the other one play.

Then we got our 4-year old girl a drum kit. For some reason people keep telling us we are insane. We are lucky enough to have no near neighbours, so she won't be annoying anyone but us. To be honest, the sound of her banging away at the drums is better than any of the other noise-making toys she has, which are all tinny electronic sounding things that make dogs howl.

It's a full drum kit, but half-size. The assembly instructions were missing, but I found a website for putting a regular kit together, and they worked out fine. So far she's resisting learning anything constructive, but has a repertoire of numbered 'songs' that she plays for anyone who cannot escape. She gave a concert for the man who cleaned our fireplace chimney the other day. Luckily he had kids of his own and was very understanding.

Recently I have been thinking about music, and other sounds, in comics. I once sat down and looked at some of the things I had written and realized they had very few sounds in them. My writing was mute, aside from speech. I have a long-term plan to correct that. I'm not going to do anything as ambitious as P. Craig Russell's Opera comics, just add some sound into my writing ... from a bouncing noise as something rubbery hits the floor, maybe a song on the radio, to a cataclysmic explosion.

So every time I pick up my bass to play a little Green Onions, Shaft, My Sharona or Fever I think about comics. Every time my wife plays guitar or my child plays drums I think of comics. I love it when distraction activities can be rationalized into part of work.