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Please explain the origin of your user name

#207
In 1987 I picked up a 62 J bass restoration project that came out of a Flint MI pawn shop. It was black. At the same time the movie The Black Stallion was popular with our young family. The bass acquired the name of the effigy in the movie. My username is a mis-spelling. Hey, there was no internet back then.
 
#208
Ever since I was a little kid I always wanted to play bass. I lived out in the sticks so music lessons of any kind was out of the question. When I started driving I began to hang around with friends who had the opportunity to take lessons and eventually form bands. I swore some day I'd learn how to play bass but just never had the opportunity. In the eighties the term wannabe was used for fans of Madonna. Though I never was a teenage girl modeling my life after a pop star (not that I recall, anyway), I was a wannabe bass player. So I finally went after my dream and learned to play. Ironically I ended up in a top 40 band with a very talented female lead that covered the Madonna vibe perfectly.

I ustabawannab ... Bass Player that is. :)
 
#210
Mine goes back a ways. In order to have a clue what this story's about, you'll need to know that I'm of Danish parentage and really proud of it. And I was very vocal on that in my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college.

So freshman year, my friend and I are sitting in the back balcony of this one class that's mandatory in the music department at this particular university. It was a zero-credit course where the whole music department had to congregate and watch each other perform repertoire. If you missed one day, you had to hang out for an extra semester to re-take it. I'm trying to establish how bored we were, and how much we were too cool for it, as freshmen so often are.

I'd been the butt of tons of viking jokes from this particular friend, which I fully supported and actively participated in. But on this particular Friday, there was a turn of events which would change our lives forever.

He turned to me and said, "Your junk's name is 'Olaf The Destroyer'."

So I had a good chuckle at that, and gradually I just adopted it as my overall nickname, often demanding our friends call me that on occasions when I needed to feel more Danish. But of course, the Danish don't tend to spell the name with an F; that's more Norwegian. So I changed it to "Olav The Destroyer." No one seemed to notice. I live in America.

The name stuck, mostly because I ardently refuse to stop self-applying it. By and by, I recorded, mixed and produced an entire album all by myself, and called it Olav The Destroyer. Then I made a website that had this bogus story about the history of Olav, peppered with Danish words that aren't real and some jokes allusive to my experiences with the German bureaucracy when I lived in Leipzig for five months. And again, it was a hit with me and some of my friends. Fame.

https://sites.google.com/a/olavthedestroyer.com/home/olavs-saga

So that's basically where my name here comes from. Years of being Olav The Destroyer can inflate the ego and endow one with delusions of grandeur, which I've come to have in spades. Thus: KingOlav.
 
#212
I just took Superman and James, sowed em up and got Jamerman, which is way better than Ssuper. I started to use it for everything, except when I play Pokemon It's one character too long >.< Then I just nickname the starter "Jamermon"
 
#214
About twelve or thirteen years ago, i was joining a local music forum, i didn't like the name i'd been using on forums so far, but i couldn't think of anything else. I'd just watched the Blur video for Coffee and TV. It features an anthropomorphic carton of milk that's trying to find the missing person picture on itself. Anyway, it's a good video. For the most part of it, the carton is smiling. So i called myself A Happy Carton of Milk and used a still of the video as my avatar. It should also be said i love milk and it is probably my main drink.

Anyway, I was pretty social on there, pretty soon people knew and started to called me Carton of milk, or Milk (sometimes Milky). Eventually i started feeling like my original name was a bit of a mouthful. And people just called me Milk, even outside of the forum because i had befriended a lot of people i'd met online first so that stuck. So sites i joined after that, it was either Milk or Cartonofmilk. To be honest, Milk is usually taken most places you sign up. I was pretty amazed that such a popular forum as TB did NOT have anyone called Milk already. It's uncommon.
 
#215
TDSLaBassiste said:
First three letters are my initials. And "LaBassiste" because in one of my first bands, one of the members never learned my last name and I was just called "Taylor the Bassist". LaBassiste just sounds so much more elegant though.
Click to expand...

It would be Le bassiste though. La would be if you were a girl. (and yes i did check your profile to make sure you were not a female Taylor).
 
#216
The Keith Moon biography "Full Moon" includes a story of Moon, Harry Nilsson and one other..Ringo, i think?.. forming a fake band with pseudonyms. Moon called himself Alvin Avalanche. I was a drummer at the time I read that (and not a very good one) and my middle name is Alvin. I told a friend that story and he said my drumming sounded like an avalanche so he started calling me that. It gradually got shortened to just Avalanche and then Avvie. It has become an actual stage name.
 
#217
Well in year 8 my nerdy friends and I used to play halo and Dawn of war during lunch, my screen name was Pistal_Whip but everyone was giving me **** for it so when I started getting good at dawn of war I changed it to Dark Eldar and then that was going to be changed to Deldar but I hit V instead of the D, and I stuck with it so, Veldar :)
 
#218
From Encyclopedia Britannica:

(from Italian rubare, "to rob"), in music, subtle rhythmic manipulation and nuance in performance. For greater musical expression, the performer may stretch certain beats, measures, or phrases and compact others. The technique is seldom indicated on a musical score but may be utilized according to the performer's discretion. Rubato may affect only the melody (as in jazz) or the entire musical texture.

In my case, many years ago I played with an extremely gifted pianist who used the phrase to politely describe my technique. When I gave him a blank stare he added "the fingers on your right hand are like unsynchronized baby hams."

45 years later not much has changed. :bassist:
 
#219
When I was growing up our neighbor (parents friend) played bass, he was in several bands and I used to hear him rehearsing all the time thru his windows. Our houses were literally 5ft. apart on the dining room side. He was an awesome player...alot of groove. So I grew up listening to "The Sound Of Bass". Been hooked ever since.
 

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