multi tasking

[leakepeter]

Hi Janek I am studying electric bass and sound design at the moment. And I am currently practicing electric bass for the majority of my day.

On top of that practicing keys and guitar, to help out with with my compositions and sound design.

I want to know how you being a multi-instrumentalist, or in a sense multi-tasker because of production and other music related work you do, gives you time to also keep on top of your bass performance. And how does one find time for it all.

For me just going into sound design is 3 hours a day at least. I want to be a pro bassist but at the same time I don't want to give up working with sound design, composition, guitar , piano , electronics and etc.....


Btw I was wondering how important is it to play upright bass? It looks to me like its a different instrument that takes alot of time and dedication but is it worth it for a modern bassist.

Regards,

[Snarf]

Looking forward to Janek's reply on this one.

In my personal experience as a bassist, I find it extremely valuable to be a doubler. In fact the majority of my bass work (which hasn't been a whole lot in the last couple years admittedly, because I'm between scenes at the moment) has been upright, and I only picked it up about 5 years ago. I devoted many, many hours a day to learning the instrument, and I like to think that my skills on both instruments are approaching parity.

It is a completely different instrument. If you have 2-3 hours a day to devote to it, as well as a teacher, I would say it's well worth investing in learning the instrument. More hours are always good.

[janekbass]

At this point in my life I've spent so much time with each of the instruments that I play, that I'm aware of my abilities with each of them. This allows me to know what's going to be possible in terms of performance at any given time, and also allows me to maintain them with minimal practice time. I concentrate primarily on the bass and still shed a lot, but I can sit down at the piano or drums and make some music happen at any time I like.

This is from simply spending hours and hours every day for many years when I was younger, playing all these instruments and being immersed in music.

It's like anything else that takes focus to learn. Becoming a high level athlete takes training every day to excel, learning a language takes speaking it every day to become fluent. And music is no different. If you want to do anything to a high level you need to spend a concentrated amount of time at some point in your life training to do that task. This will build things into your muscle memory and leave them there to be accessed very quickly throughout your life.

Janek