Day Three: How to be Great (Ten Days and a Bass Guitar)

Every Thursday afternoon throughout 2001 I would stand in front of an easel with a piece of black charcoal in my hand trying to draw the live nude model in front of me. On occasion, my architecture tutor would pipe up and say, “…if you want to be a great architect, you have to think like a great architect, and live like one. Go out and buy a fancy sports car, live in a fancy house and eat fancy food – live like an architect!” We would all laugh at this madman, with his crazy notions. But as I was ‘shlappin’ yesterday, I started to wonder whether there was actual method in his madness.

“Fuck it,” I thought, “what’ve I got to lose? I’m alone in the house after all” I then proceeded to stand up (because I was sitting down with the bass on my lap), put the strap over my shoulder, widened my stance ridiculously and started to play while gyrating my hips and bobbing my head. Now, I’m not going to say I instantly began to play like a master, but I did see a significant increase in my ability and, the more I gyrated, the better I played. I don’t claim that standing with your legs stupidly apart, moving to the rhythm physically affects how you play, it may do, but it may not. What it does do is make you feel great; the rest of the world drops away and you actually feel like you’re an expert bassist just by virtue of doing what expert bassists do.

Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers is really good at strutting his stuff on stage so I guess what I was doing was Flea-esque. The realisation that you can’t be a great guitarist AND a great bassist simply dissipated as I stood there jamming to Born Under a Bad Sign, and as I sit here at work (on my lunch break, of course) I can’t help but relive the moment I was looking at my bad rendition of a nude model all those years ago and listening to who I thought was a raving lunatic. I would advise you to pull out those old VHS tapes and ad hoc recordings of Cream, Pearl Jam and the Stones, watch the likes of Bill Wyman and Joe Osborne (and Flea) in action, and from that develop your own style of bobbing, gyrating and fancy footwork – feel the music, play with soul, live, breathe and act like a great bassist.

Songs learnt: Jimi Hendrix – Born Under a Bad Sign
Red Hot Chilli Peppers – The Zephyr Song

Day Two: The Predicament (Ten Days and a Bass Guitar)

So as I was 'shlappin da bashe' last night (which, mind you I'm still learning to do because slapping da bass requires considerable practice and skill) and I realised that the bass guitar isn't like a normal guitar. Apart from the obvious four strings instead of six and the extended neck (which leads to difficulties even for my long fingers), there is a key point on which bass guitars differ from your average, run of the mill, bog standard electric or acoustic which is that you can't let notes ring out and play other notes over them in the normal scheme of things. There are techniques, I'm sure, which allow for this but I'm yet to learn them and until then if I want to play two notes consecutively (which would be the norm, unless you're Prince) I have to stop the first note, either by palm or finger, before I start the second one lest my guitar playing starts to sound like a mangled wreck of notes, one on top of the other.

Now, this is a predicament. I've been playing the guitar for nearly eight years and I'm used to letting notes ring out over other notes. What I'm not used to is stopping a note every time I want to play a different note. An even bigger pickle I came across in my mind while I walked to the central station this morning was the realisation that it would be very difficult to be an excellent bassist AND an excellent guitarist. It's like one of my friends used to say, "playing squash messes up my tennis stroke" - I had just thrashed him on the squash court and took this as an excuse from him so that he didn't have to play squash again. But maybe it's true - maybe playing squash really DOES mess up your tennis stroke. Let's face it, do you know any squash players who excel at tennis, or visa versa? So, in the same way, playing bass messes up your guitar stroke, and visa versa!

This is indeed a sad day and I hope to wake up tomorrow having no memory of this realisation. On the bright side, I did learn to play the bassline for Santana's Smooth, and probably kept the neighbours up.

Peace, love, revolutions

Ten Days and a Bass Guitar

A friend of mine today took it upon himself to lend me his bass guitar while he went meandering through the dessert. While walking home with it on my back, amplifier in hand, I was checked out by three girls, treated like royalty, and sang to by a crazy South African man. Something about that bass guitar said, “here’s a man worth noticing.” Or, “here’s an arrogant twat.” Either way, the experience was a change from the normal walk home, which often involves being metaphorically shat on and gang-raped by swaggering, tracksuit-wearing buggers or unnecessarily angry kids carrying unnecessarily complex phones.

The bass guitar gave me a sense of power. I was safe in the knowledge that if one of those angry kids decided to hurl his phone at me off the cuff I could easily bat it away, or at least dodge it and break out into a lean, mean, groovy bass riff. So I’ve decided to document the next ten days, in honor of my bass guitar experience.

Day 1: The long walk to freedom

Cry freedom! The South African’s are here to sing us Bob Marley and make everything ok! Yes, I didn’t know his name but I knew he was from South Africa. The man who stopped me near the central station looked rough – almost as if he had been through the Anglo-Boer war three times, on the wrong side. Perhaps it was the amp in my hand which attracted him to me, perhaps it was my good looks, charm and professional swagger, nevertheless he was attracted to me (in the most heterosexual and plutonic way possible) and took it upon himself to sing me his rendition of Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. I say his rendition because what came out of his mouth sounded more like a bad version of Cats (drowning) than Redemption Song. It was terrible. So terrible, in fact, that I was tempted to use the aforementioned bass guitar to hack my arm off just to take my mind off the pain of listening to him. I’m still thanking God he didn’t make it passed the first chorus.

I walked on in good humor (for not even Bob ‘Schultz’ Marley could put a damper on my mood – I had a bass guitar, after all) and became very aware of low-hanging road signs and signals. I’m quite tall and the bass axe added around half a foot to my stature. I also became aware of the fact that everyone was looking at me. Even the unnecessarily angry kids took time out from listening to their blaring phones to have a gander. One would think I was carrying an AK-47, not a guitar. People stopped what they were doing, got out of their cars, abseiling window cleaners lowered themselves on pain of losing their jobs, and girls took it upon themselves to unhook their bras when I passed. Ok, that last sentence was a load of crap and happened only in my head, but I’m certain that that’s what would have happened if it weren’t for my overgrown ‘terrorist’ beard.

All jokes aside though, the main thing you notice when you have a bass guitar on your back is bass lines – from the funky bass riffs of James Brown to the bluesy bass riffs of Clapton and Hendrix, and the overdriven bass riffs of Rage against the Machine and Muse. I’ve been a guitarist for many years and, while I’ve always been really good at picking out each instrument in an arrangement, I’ve always focused on the rhythm or lead guitar tracks. You must understand that suddenly and automatically focusing on the bass track blaring through my earphones was a completely novel experience; even more novel was the realization that this focus was present only by virtue of the fact that I was carrying a bass guitar. It is truly and amazing instrument.

The next ten days are going to be fun.

Peace, love and revolutions.