Help! I became (like) my girlfriend by playing bass :-)

Lounge
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Ok, not really.

But since I started learning to play bass, I slowly adapted my musical taste to her’s - without noticing. Am I alone in that?

Only when she first started humming while I was practicing bass and then singing along, I asked her if everything was ok, as she NEVER hums or sings to “my music”.

She had to laugh, in this typical way that girlfriends do, when they feel superior (= always!), and said: “You are listening to MY music now, dummy!”.

Note: she is a “guitar chick” and listens mainly to “Gitarrengeschrabbel” (cannot translate this).

WTF? She was right!

I have a long history of listening, dancing to and generally partying to music. Never played an instrument before, except the triangle…

My grandfather gave me my first turntable (a red philips portable suitcase record player, yeah!) when I was six, and gave me loads of used 45’s singles every month (he was in the jukebox business - think: “Wurlitzer”). He was a great guy!

So by the age of 12 I had thousands and thousands of singles, got into soul, then disco and funk, in the 80s punk and new wave, industrial, EBM, new beat, then acid, goa, jungle, and finally all flavours of techno and house music. Now the electronic scene became unbearable boring, but that’s another topic…

I always liked bass, since I was a child and especially whenI got my first Yamaha NS1000M monitors and a proper amp (must habe been 12/13 then), but I went more and more into electronic sounds (my revelation came with “Are friends electric” by Gary Numan). And less and less in stuff with somebody singing.

I always said: “music is when I can DANCE to it”, my girlfriend always says: “music is when I can SING to it!"

So now I look at my play list, and I see Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, Stone Temple Pilots, Audioslave, Garbage, Placebo, Muse, Royal Blood etc.

What is wrong with me? Am I a (bass) guitar chick now???!:blush:

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Short answer: yes. Yes, you are.

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Nothing wrong with that :wink: lol
All have some banging bass lines :+1:

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I especially hate that I love Royal Blood now, as Mike Kerr does impossible stuff.

From Wikipedia: “Their signature sound is built around Kerr’s bass playing style, which sees him using various effects pedals and amps to make his bass guitar sound like an electric guitar and bass guitar at the same time.”

It’s unplayable. Not even @JoshFossgreen could do that. Hmmmm. Could he???! :wink:

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Haha, read a huge article on that once, man’s genius :joy:

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Mark Smith has a tutorial on how to get the sound:

Obviously, that is only a approximation, as Mike Kerr uses 3 channels, but you get the idea.

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Man … I haven’t even finished B2B properly and struggle still with “Billie Jean”!

But after watching the first 20 seconds of this video, I connected a random pedal and played like Mark Smith being cloned with some additional Les Claypool DNA :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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Man, I hate that every time I see a Mark Smith video, my retinas just burned though :dizzy_face: lol

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I do find Mark’s stare mesmerizing, though!

eyes

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Lol, after being flashbanged by the pure white background, my stare is much more vacant, can’t see a thing anymore :joy:

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It’s funny, after picking up the bass, I find myself playing all sorts of styles, or trying to at least.

I’d never put on a Stevie Wonder song at home, but can I appreciate the Sir Duke bass line and listen to the song in my headphones for 20 times straight without getting tired of trying to play it? Yes sir.

Metal music just energises me in a way that no other music could ever do, and then I have little reason to listen to something my system and ears define as “inferior”. People have always asked how I could stand listening to Black/Death/Grindcore only. I always said “This is how it sounds in my head 24/7, it just resonates and keeps me calm”.

But I try and play every genre out there and just the feeling of playing a song is magic, even if it’s music I myself would never listen to. It’s weird.

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Most music I listened too was created with bass synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines. Pattern-based music. I am/was deep in the underground techno/electronic scene…
That’s no fun to play on a bass, with very few exceptions. “All this constant repetition”, to quote Fad Gadget in “Coitus Interruptus”…

So I was forced to explore the Dark Side of the Force (“Gitarrengeschrabbel”) for my new hobby … as I wrote before, much to the joy of my girlfriend, that found new reasons to sing (along).

That opened up a whole new (and sometimes old) world to me. Stevie Wonder is much closer too me (incidentally, my first 12" was “Hotter than July”, in 1980) than Metallica. Now I enjoy practicing bass to both.
In my “old days” I became mild :slight_smile:

Playing along “analog” songs makes me feel as part of the band, with all the joy if I’m in the groove … and the feeling or shame of having let down the band if I play awful. And by band, I mean: the band of the recording I play too, so they’ll never know :slight_smile:

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