Writers Block

[Smokey999]

Hey talk bass. I've been having a lot of trouble writing bass lines lately. I feel that it was going great with it until 2 weeks ago. I haven't been able to write anything that great since then. Maybe learning a bunch of new cover or taking lessons for a few months would help.


What I should I do?

[mambo4]

Originally Posted by Smokey999

Maybe learning a bunch of new cover or taking lessons for a few months would help.

I think you answered your own question.

[MalcolmAmos]

I enjoy looking at bass clef sheet music to see what bass line has been used in that specific song. Here is an example of eight different possibilities from the minor pentatonic scale.

embedit.in — Bass clef pentatonics
Notice there are 8 pages.

See if that gives you some ideas of what could be done.

[MattP]

You came up with two great ideas, but I'll give you another. Get away from your bass for a little while. Get out of the house and do something you've never done before. Really dig into the experience. When your finished, talk about the experience through your bass. Be sure to turn off your internal critic while you do this. Sometimes, I'll record myself when I do this, but I won't monitor it. I'll listen to what I came up with after the fact. Generally I find that most of what I played is crap. However there are generally a diamonds that need to be polished.

[Russell L]

Not sure how well this applies, but I have found that the best cure for writer's block, when writing my own essays, is to BEGIN. That is, while sitting staring at a blank sheet of paper, I only have to beging to say ANYTHING and the rest will eventually come. However, applying that idea to music composition is a bit different. A good analogy comes from a practice I had last week with some guys. We were jamming. I played a one-barphrase right off the top of my head, and it became the motif for the next jam. If I had been trying to make up something it might've been more difficult.

[Sublab]

Another help could be to fool around with other instruments, it helps mewhen I need it. But it also helps to simply start playing and just keep on playing, without trying to nail that one super riff. Play stuff you usually wouldn't play and play the stuff you usually play in a way you would normally not. If you stick it through the inspiration is bound to come back. Some of my riffs and loops actually formed out of 'bad' notes I accidentally played while shaping riffs. And don't get fixed too much on the idea of writer's block, it's all in your head.

[Smokey999]

Thanks for all the ideas, I'm starting to get the flow back. I started playing my ukulele again and came up with an awesome riff for a prog song. That reminded me of a prog song I wrote on bass a while back. So i picked it up and wrote it out and added the ukulele. Also I learned some new covers and got my friends to learn them too.

[AlvarHanso]

For me, playing around with new effects pedals and just jamming different sounds will often lead to riffing on something, and then elaborating it. But that's an expensive way to write.

[MattP]

Originally Posted by AlvarHanso

For me, playing around with new effects pedals and just jamming different sounds will often lead to riffing on something, and then elaborating it. But that's an expensive way to write.

I used to find that to be true as well. I ran into a problem of relying too much on the effects after a period of time, so I dumped them all. I know that doesn't happen to everybody, but it really killed my creativity for a while.

[deathbassist]

I just get some inspiration by listening to music. Then the flow comes back.....most of the time.

[zachoff]

Write on guitar.

[mambo4]

Originally Posted by zachoff

Write on guitar.

actually I'm going to second that -or piano, or any instrument you don't have habitual tendancies on.