Since the keyboards have the bass covered, I think that's a green light for you to solo over every bar of every song.
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Help! Keyboardist is playing over me!
- Thread starter Shenaniflan
- Start date
When did passive aggressive, faux alpha male posturing become a part of our job description as bass players? Just put your feelings out there and see where the conversation goes. If Abuelo doesn't/can't understand and the band is with him, next move is yours and it doesn't involve cutting anything off of anybody, damaging gear, or overplaying like a brat.
Jaco said be hated that in the end.
There is also Night Passage, River People I can remember.
I can only talk to my point, but, the OP raised the issue with the band, the band leader gave an unsatisfactory solution. The OP said the keys player contacted him to work out arrangements so they weren't playing over each other.
I'm the king of passive-aggressive, but if you talk it out and don't find a workable solution, the OP has 3 choices:
- continue as is and be unhappy in the band
- find a different place to play and play a different bassline. It's ok to not play roots...you can play something that harmonizes with the keys bass line. I don't feel.this is passive-aggressive, because you've already talked it out.
- quit the band
I haven't had coffee yet.
Works beautifully, nonetheless.
Would you have a source for Jaco saying that? Not doubting you, would just be interested to learn more.
The subject here is Zawinul doubling Jaco throughout the songYes, it’s hard to imagine Jaco disliking anything that Jaco did
It's in the biography by Bill Milkowski "Jaco: The Extraordinary and Tragic Life of Jaco Pastorius".
Or it's in one about Weather Report, or Zawinul, I can't remember, but you should read all of them anyway
My books are in a cardbox, it's a good occasion to put them back on a shelf.
That was a source of tension at some point.
Zawinul was a very good bass line writer.
You can read in the bio that there was some sort of macho rivalry between Joe and Jaco.
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Why isn't the part in bold a workable solution? Do we even know what the keyboard player has in mind in terms of arrangements?
Good question. Only the OP knows. The OP's opinion is: "As far as I'm concerned, the only arrangement that's going to work is for him to stop playing his poopy, monotonous, uncreative, squelching, boring-a$$ bass lines or play them an octave higher so I can even hear myself think."
The problem here is that there are many songs that do have legit bass/keys doubling on them. If they're playing SRV's "Crossfire," for example, this is the proper way to play it. The keys are kinda down in that mix and they're super tight so someone could easily mistake it for just a very brightly EQ'd bass guitar.
That's just one example and if a person isn't really that familiar with the arrangements on songs like these, it's a better idea to talk about it than just to fume needlessly when someone's actually doing the job on those songs.
Unfortunately we have so many tropes around this left hand thing that people have forgotten how to cooperate with each other in an ensemble, but it doesn't have to be this way.
Another way of looking at it would be to just decide to accept it as a quirk of the band, decide to let it go, and decide just have fun playing even if the mix is sub-optimal. If you're the only one bothered by it (even though it's justified to be bothered), then the easy solution is to make peace with it.
Per the 'digital keyboard out of tune' strand in this thread, my Yamaha S70XS wandered off of A440 during an outdoor gig. I theorized it had to do with humidity and the pitch bend wheel. Only had the problem that once. So it does happen.
