What my origin story…hahaha. Man, it goes back a very long way.
In 1965 my family moved from the 'burbs of Chicagoland to a resort lake in northern Wisconsin 50 miles north of Green Bay. Yeah I know, colder than an ex-wives heart. Winter was coming on and I’d been booted from the Frosh BB team due to the length of my hair. Yeah, believe it. It was that era.
I needed something to keep me from going crazy stuck living on a frozen over lake 15 miles out of town and too young yet to drive. It dawned on me there were three rock bands in our little rural HS and only two of them had bass players. So for my Christmas gift I talked my Pop into buying me a used Silvertone bass for $30 and I bought an Airline guitar amp from a classmate for $10. That was when the seeds of my sins as a musician were first planted.
I bought a Mel Bay instructional book to learn how to tune the bass and practice some fundamental bass lines. No tab either. Had to read F cleff. Everyday after work chores in our family business and dinner I would go up to my room, put records on my portable stereo, and listen to and learn bass lines from popular tunes. If I could hear it well enough I could learn to play it by ear which is a huge reason why I favor teaching ear training early on.
Around late April or early May one band asked me to become their lead singer so of course I joined them. Roughly a month later the bassist, who eventually went on to become phenomenal pro guitarist, said he had to leave the band due to his summer job. Our lead guitarist looked at me and said “You gotta a bass don’t you”. LOL And that was it. Six months into just learning to play I am now the lead singer and the bassist in this new band of ours.
Now here’s another thing that’s amusing to me. Many of us struggle to sing and play simultaneously especially playing a bass. People have asked me how I manage it and I usually laugh and tell them it’s how I started out doing it. No one ever told me how difficult in might be or that I couldn’t do it…so I did.
That band got quite good and played shows with quite a few national recording acts. We stayed together for the next three years until we had all graduated HS and eventually went our own way but I still keep in touch with our drummer and that lead guitarist whose now a Delta Blues player with a great local rep in Green Bay, WI. He always was a great player but not a great singer. Well for anyone whose ever listened to Delta Blues knows you don’t have to be a great singer to handle that genre. Just know some words and how to play slide guitar on a resonator. I’ll see both of them this summer.
I’m 51, and just now really picking it up.
I played cello for a semester in fourth grade, piano lessons for about as long in fifth, trumpet in sixth, and tuba in eighth. Of those I liked cello the best, but I moved to a different school that didn’t have strings. Band was OK, but it wasn’t really interacting with music in a way that engaged me.
Went to an arts magnet high school for visual art, which set me on a different path for many years. Spent most of twenties selling art supplies and trying to get established as a professional oil painter. Most of my thirties going to college for digital photography and co-owning a radical bookstore. My forties were about raising a family, aided greatly by getting a solid job in data analytics.
So Gen-X here, my mom was dancing on her chair at a Sly and the Family show, with me in utero. I was breast fed to What’s Going On. For most my life my relationship with music has been a consumer. I think mid-90’s, when I first heard Morphine, was probably when I first started daydreaming about playing bass.
Anyway three and a half years ago, I found a 2007, made in Indonesia, Slammer by Hamer, short scale bass at Goodwill for $45 and it just spoke to me. Plonked around on it along to random algorithm selected YouTube videos for a couple weeks, and then it began to gather dust.
Then mid-January this year, I rewatched the documentary Towncraft https://youtu.be/8rmqURFbcrk?si=Xio2BOng44sqYO9h
about the LR, AR punk scene in the late 80’s and 90’s. I lived through that, see a lot of old friends, some now passed, and I looked at that dust covered bass in my basement, and I just know that Victor Wiley is frowning down on me from up high.
So, I picked it back up. For the past six weeks, I’ve been playing at least ten minutes every day, some days as long as an hour.
Even if I’m just playing simple exercises and scales the vibrations of clean, well articulated notes are very satisfying, even therapeutic.
I don’t know, this last time I picked it up, something just clicked for me.
Started B2B a week ago, currently a day behind on the 3 month schedule. Whatever, I’m not so worried about the schedule as getting through the content, which is so good.
when i was a little kid there was (in the 70s) a music education method called the Carl Orff method and it was taught in my school. so i grew up playing violin in these classes. later i switched to flute because my granddad played one and gave me his. i stopped everything before high school, for a short time i tried to learn drums and quickly discovered i cannot keep even two separate rhythms going in my head, let alone more. and then punk rock came along and i wanted to play in a band. with a bass. i never considered anything else. never really learned to play it. forgot about it for years until just a few years ago.
I just started playing a few months ago (I’m 47). Flashback to early high school/late middle school, I had a couple of friends who were in a band. They encouraged me to play bass, because of the age old reason “no bass player”. I didn’t take them up on it, but I always remembered that as a missed opportunity. Fast forward to 6-7 years ago, my son, who was playing percussion in middle school was worried about not making the jazz band in percussion. But, they needed a bass player. With some encouragement from me, he picked up a bass and has been playing since then. After seeing his love of the bass, I finally decided to give it a try. One thing that had held me back, was I’ve always worried about my hands. I have rheumatoid arthritis, and I worried playing bass would either aggravate it or I would have problems even playing. Granted, I don’t have a lot of problems with my hands/fingers, it was a barrier in my mind. After a few months of playing, Ive noticed that as long a I use good positioning I don’t have any issues. Actually, I think playing bass has been a great physical therapy exercise. My hands/fingers don’t seem to be as stiff, and I feel like my dexterity and strength has improved in other tasks as well. Sorry for the long winded post. If you made it this far, cheers!!
I am in middle of an existential crisis right now about committing my time and money on learning to play bass guitar vs other instruments.
I searched for “why do you play bass” on the BassBuzz forum and did not it as a topic. I am curious about how and why you all became bass players.
Thanks.
My family has always been musical. Both my grandmothers played the organ. In elementary and middle school, I played accordion… shortly after graduating high school, my brother started playing guitar. He looked to be enjoying it so much, and I’d finally gotten to a point where I was appreciating rock-n-roll and all its related styles, so I decided to give it a go.
It was a short-lived go, for sure. I realized that when I was appreciating rock-n-roll and all its related styles, it was the basslines that I was hearing, and grooving with, and humming. So, I sold my guitar rig, bought a bass rig, and haven’t looked back since.
(Although as mentioned elsewhere, I did have a brief accordion renaissance in early 2021, before joining BassBuzz.)
Since then (that being the early 90s) bass has been a part of my life. Sure, there have been extended periods where I sold off my gear and wasn’t playing, but I always followed bass and have always come back to it. There’s something kinda… happy… almost Zen-like when I’m playing bass. It’s just a good feeling, you know?
I’ve attempted guitar a few times over my years (13, 20’s, 30’s) and it just never bit me. I didn’t like practicing and when I played with others I struggled. Now I’m in my late 50’s and on a whim thought I’d give bass a try and it immediately made sense and things are clicking for me. I’m sure part of this is maturity, but for whatever reason I’m now hungry to learn as much as I can and I’m really enjoying playing. And playing with others is fun
Around 2019 (ahh, the good ol days) my friend asked if I wanted to learn bass (he’s not even really a bassist…) and he gave me a piece of paper with the string names and notes of the fretboard written on it, and told me how to pluck and fret. It was the first time I had picked up an instrument, but I love music and have always wanted to play an instrument so I kinda ran with it. I am still very much a beginner, as I don’t quite yet know how to break out of just chugging on the root note of the chord, but I’m slowly making my way through B2B and hoping I can get there someday.
This. I can’t not notice the bass line in songs I’m listening to. When I talk about bass lines in (sometimes very well-known) songs, people I’m talking to often are like “Really? I never really noticed that bass line.” And I’m like, "How can you not notice that?“
Indeed. It’s mysteriously similar to how we choose a mate or a friend. There’s just something about that person (or in the case of a musical instrument, the bass) that either attracts us, or it doesn’t. But when it does, it’s undeniable.
