For you former guitar players: Writing songs?

[Deadworks]

For those of us who primarily were guitar players but now are bass players. Do you write songs on guitar or bass now? How long did it take, if ever, before you started writing songs primarily on bass?

After two years now I still write the new song on guitar and honestly don't think about the bassline at all. I teach the song to my guitar player and then when we work on the song at practice a bassline just "appears" I don't have to puch much thought in, it just comes out. Which baffles me how it works out like that.

[trog]

Bass is very much my primary instrument and always has been, yet I still write songs with a guitar. Whatever works.

[Lord Henry]

I moved from playing guitar to playing bass in my band at the end of last year. I now only right songs on the bass as that is what I will be playing on the track. I will usually tell the guitarist what cords I want him to play and give some suggetions as to how I think it should sound (fast, clipped cords/long ringing cords, distorted/clean, that sort of thing) but mostly I leave that up to him. If I were to show him exactly what to play then it would be in my style and idiom (sp?) and not his. To me the way we each play our instoments is just as important to how we sound as what we write, so I like to give people room to do their own thing. The guitarist works the same way when he writes stuff (though he doesn't play bass and so would be less likely to write bass lines anyway).

I'm not saying that every band should work like this, but it's how we do things.

Cheers