I recently was speaking to a close musician friend of mine, and we were discussing our musical evolution. We each chose the most influential things we've learned during our musical career, and some very interesting introspective points came up.
I'd love to share these with you all, my favorite group of fellow musicians, and I'd be interested to hear yours.
For my experience, I have been playing music now for over 13 years. I am fluent at bass guitar, guitar, percussion, and piano. I can get by on violin and upright bass if need be. I am very technically proficient, I have several years of music theory under my belt (including two years of composition and film scoring) and have played with well over 300 different musicians and any style you could possibly care to name. I even get a royalty check for a musical score I did for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's educational show (for which my boss received a regional emmy!), and did some scoring/sound design post-production work for the Discovery channel.
I've gotten around quite a bit. I like to think I've learned quite a lot along the way as well. Hopefully some of this information will come in handy!
Note: I chose not to post these in the "best musical advice you've ever gotten" thread simply because they aren't all advice, but rather mostly experience and trial/error. 1. Listening
For the first 4-5 years of my playing, I was obsessed with being a huge virtuoso, and could play (slightly sloppily, admittedly) any wooten tune you could care to name by the time I was a junior in high school. I was that jerk showing off in guitar center--people would walk up after I threw down a Stu Hamm line and ask what I did and I would shrug and dismissively say "just some line from a guy named Stu Hamm.
After 9 years of playing, I had my world rocked. I was playing for a church (which was strange, actually. Not only am I Buddhist, not Christian, but it was an all-black Southern Baptist church and I was the sole white fella in there... and I was the one playing bass! An amusing reversal of the stereotype) every Sunday. The music was 100% improv. The keyboardist would take lead, playing music to affect the mood of the whole church... changing key, voicings, and tempo on the fly.
My first day I tried desperately to keep up. I'd fumble around every time he changed things up, focusing heavily on my fretboard and trying to think of ways to play lines that weren't just root notes. At the end of the sermon, the band leader came to me with a simple statement:
"Man, you good. You really good at playing that thing. But next time let that thing play you."
Cheesy, and a lesson that many of us no doubt know well by now. But it's one thing to know it, and another entirely to understand it. The next sermon, I didn't look at my bass at all. I played entirely by feel, and I kept my eyes on the preacher the whole time. I flubbed a few notes here and there, but I was onto something. Three weeks later, I was playing some of the most complex, rhythmic, enjoyable music I'd ever played in my whole life!
I know this sounds a little New-Agey. But it's much simpler than that; everything I ever learned was in my brain. I knew it by feel and by sound, not by intellect. I developed a few exercises to work on this, shared below.
Exercise 1: The feel of Rhythm
If you're like me, you might have an easy time counting a complex rhythm but frequently a difficult time feeling it as naturally as you'd like. To that extent, I developed a very simple exercise that has been very effective for me.
Set a metronome to a slow, steady tick. I like the low 100's for this. Play a simple rhythm, with strongly defined accents on the 1 and the 3.
ACCENT-soft-ACCENT-soft
As soon as that feels comfortable (which should be fairly quickly), change the accents to the 2 and the 4.
soft-ACCENT-soft-ACCENT
As soon as that feels comfortable, swap back to 1 and 3, but start slipping in triplets on the 2.
ACCENT-onetwothree-ACCENT-soft
The goal here is to play continuously, changing your accents and complicating your rhythms on the fly. At first, you may find yourself thinking about it too much and get frustrated. Eventually, you'll find that you're feeling it more than you're thinking about it. This was a huge help for my improv, as I was constantly able to feel complex rhythms as naturally as I felt the simple 4/4 beats!
2. Gear doesn't matter. Wait, yes it does.
Gear is a confusing beast. We know that great bass players are great regardless of the instrument's quality, but we also know that the instrument's quality does have an affect on the player's physical limitations. We know that it's important to make a sound your own, but that there's value in using certain amplifiers to achieve certain sounds.
I learned an important lesson when I first started gigging with my first truly popular band. We arrived to a large 400-500 person gig, up a flight of stairs that my peavey 1618 cab made absolute hell. Lugging up the giant tube head was equally miserable. After all this hassle, the sound guy wanders up to me and hands me a Radial DI, plugs me into the board, and tells me to keep my amp's volume low so it doesn't negatively impact the mix.
I was floored. I spent a large amount of time and money customizing this amp, getting just the right sound, and yet it was going to be nothing more than a pretty backdrop--or so I thought.
The next time, I just showed up with my own DI. I plugged in, and the show got under way. I was horrible. My mix in the monitors was complete garbage, and I felt like I was trying to listen to two different songs at once as I strained to hear myself and the drummer.
This leads me into the most important gear-related lesson I've ever learned: The MOST important part of gear is that YOU sound good to YOURSELF. If you don't sound good, you'll find a fundamental disconnect between yourself and your music. Make sure that you always bring gear that you love, even if you know you're not going to use it because of PA support or some such. It will drastically change the way you play.
3. Playing with other musicians can't make you worse, but it can make you better.
You get out of music what you put into it. The simple fact is that there are a LOT of awful musicians out there. I couldn't begin to count the number of tasteless drummers I've played with.
When you have these horrible experiences, YOU get to decide how they work. Let's say his rhythm is horribly off. See if you can get him on. Throw some muted notes where you want his snare to be. If your guitarist does nothing but solo, start exploring how you can change the feel of his solo just by dictating the background rhythm or your octave of play.
Play every genre. Get rid of your musical prejudices. I know this is a bit of a didactic rant, but I really can't emphasize enough how valuable this all it. You might not listen to dubstep, but see if you can play along with a few songs. See how the simplest lines in that music carry the entire dance rhythm. Play with some band that insists you only play 8th note root notes. Look at how much space that creates and the effect it has.
Exercise 2: The sound(s) of music.
Turn on Pandora. Plug in a random band. Play along with every song that pops up. See how the bass (or lack thereof) affects the feel of the song, and see if you can recreate the same feel with a different line. See if you can understand even the simplest decisions.
Example: I don't have a strong love for hip-hop, but I've always loved the subtlety of the basslines. It's easy to dismiss them, but there's some really interesting stuff that has made its way into my lines all across the board.
First, listen to the beat in this song:
T-Pain Feat. Young Joc - Buy U A Drink - YouTube
The bass will kick in at around 25 seconds. Notice that it is only present for every other repetition. What does this cause?
-Feel how smooth the song is when the bass is there. It's simple, only one note, but you can barely stop your body from leaning back whenever it kicks in!
-On the repetitions without the bass, the beat suddenly feels much lighter, and much poppier. Now you're moving slightly less lazily, but the difference is subtle as can be. Not only is the beat a great dance beat, but it actually changes the way you can dance to it every 4 bars! It's such a tightly established beat that t-pain's loose rhythm over it sounds remarkably solid!
The basic point is that there's something to learn from all music, including music that you find terrible. Try playing it and see if you can understand WHY you feel the way you feel.
4. Be willing to share.
Many, many musicians keep their knowledge a complete secret. There seems to be a fear of someone else "stealing" your musical knowledge and capitalizing off of it. Think of any time you've heard a guitar riff or slap line or synth beat and thought "they clearly ripped this off of _____".
Step back. Music, music theory, and even showmanship are all collaborative arts. There's not really any such thing as "ripping off," not REALLY. There may be a tendency among some musicians to play familiar lines they think they wrote, but it's really nothing more than a sound they learned to like.
Music is not a competition. Treating it as such can only hurt you and your musical advancement.
Small anecdote to explain a little more clearly:
When I had just gotten double thumbing down, I had a tendency to get my nail caught on my E and A strings. Nevertheless, I showed it off to every musician friend I could find. Several of my bass friends asked how I did it, and I'd frequently dismiss it with "it's very hard and takes a lot of practice." I regret saying that now. It was true for me, but that doesn't mean it would have been true for them! I was simply afraid of not being "the best."
About a year later, I still was getting my thumbnail caught. I was at a fantastic music shop in VA Beach (Alpha Music) and was playing some showy tunes when an 11-year old kid came up to me (I was 16 at the time). He asked me how I did what I was doing, and was gripping his cheap ibanez eagerly. I sat down to show him, and he picked it up in under 5 minutes. When I say picked it up, I mean he was better than I was despite having never tried it before. I realized that I actually felt... great! This little kid was making a fool of me, but I was excited beyond belief to have taught it well.
Coincidentally, while I was teaching it, something clicked. I realized that my thumb was slightly (only slightly) improperly positioned when I stretched my hand out to do those low strings. All it took was an extra 20 seconds of trying to explain how I did it for me to see I was doing it wrong!
5. There is no "good" or "bad."
This is definitely the preachiest of my points, but it's the one that I consider the most valuable. I'll also spend the least words on it.
It's very simple. Stop thinking about whether bassists are "good" or "bad." Nothing hurts your own musical advancement more. Every bassist simply has a style. Some may have a style you prefer, and some may not. Some may play simple lines, and some may not. But most importantly,
always remember that there is no objective measurement for musical skill. We form our own value systems and base our judgments of other musicians off these values. To call someone "bad" is, quite simply, bigotry and insulting towards a musician who simply doesn't have the same values you do.
Stop calling other musicians bad. See if they have something to teach you, even if it's just what not to do. If they do something that sounds absolutely awful to your ears, remember that you've LEARNED to prefer a specific form of music. Don't say "that bassist is bad," say "I do not prefer his style of playing."
Music comes from inside. The more you realize that you can control what kind of music you like, the more open you will be. The more you will learn.
And... in contradiction to my own point...
the better you will be!
Thanks for reading the WoT. I'd love to hear some other valuable lessons along these lines, so feel free to share!
