any other bassists who write songs but dont often sing them?
 

I've been playing in a reggae band for over a year now. we have a handle on a multitude of covers by various artist within the genre, sublime, slightly stoopid, pepper, expendables to name a few. we have a 16 track mixer and are working on producing our own album for this summer and selling them at future shows. i am not a singer, but i have written the lyrics to all of our original songs.

has anyone been the silent songwriter in their group? or if you do sing, any advise on singing and playing simultaneously? id like to branch out eventually to singing lead on some of my songs.

I have written lyrics for my band. They end up awesome or cheesy as hell, but always good. When alone I love to sing, but for some reason around other people I don't sound right, so I guess I will limit myself to back vocals.

I suggest you try to make your bass playing be almost robotic. I mean it kind of works for me. I can keep playing while singing, but I won't solo for you.

Iron Maiden
 

If your singer is good, why try to fix what ain't broken? Look at Steve Harris, he writes the vocal melodies and (I believe) lyrics to most Iron Maiden songs, but he does not sing them.

Obviously I have not heard you sing, but just because you write the lyrics (and melodies?) does not automatically mean you are the best person to sing them. Just my 2 cents, though.

I write all the songs for my band, including the lyrics, melodies and harmonies. It just so happens that I can't sing to save my life. But I know the singer's range, where she sounds most powerful, and preferred styles, so we really make it work that way.

I don't/can't? sing
 

I love to sing, I've written, but the band won't LET me sing.

I think there's a hint there. :hiding:

I can't always sing my own songs, either because I lack the range or because the line is too hard to play while singing. I've been very, very fortunate to play with singers who sing my stuff a lot better than I do.

I write about 40% of the lyrics for my band, give or take. I sing about 30% of the songs. As far as singing and playing, start with the very minimum necessary to convey the bassline and practice that until you can play that and sing it. Add little by little to the bassline until you get it back where it is when you're strictly playing and practice the hell out of it, then once you're comfortable playing the bassline as it was originally written and singing, you can add any flourishes and such. There are whole threads on how to sing and play, including a very informative thread lead by Jive1.

All that said, I didn't initially want to sing, I just have a very rhythmic singing style and phrasing that others seem to have a hard time grasping at times, so it kind of fell to me to sing what I write, except for a few songs.

I got this advice from a fellow TB'r a while back, great - great stuff:

It's a polyrhytmic issue:
Playign Rhythm A while singing Rhythm B.

Here's how:
Put the bass down.
Clap the exact Bass rhythm (rhythm A)
once you Clap rhythm A accurately and with confidence,
Clap it while singing rhythm B.
The trouble spots you need to work on should become immediately apparent.

Only pick up your bass after you can do this with full confidence while clapping and singing. Otherwise you're at the mercy of mental overload defaulting to habit.

Hope that can help you, it's helped me quite a bit

thanks. i dunno if id say i wrote the melodies, but i did decide the chord progressions on some of them and then let my guitarist figure out how we wanted them to sound.

I write all the songs for my band. I only sing harmony on them with the band. I love song writting almost as much as playing bass. I will usually write a song, put chords to on acoustic, play it for the band then back to bass with it. I do like to get my bass lines down before I start working in harmonys.