2023.
Its been a little over 3 years of bass playing for me.
Quite recently I got myself a really nice and comfy to play Dingwall Afterburner II. It has really pushed me to play more and I find myself picking up my bass often. I am very happy with it.
I have been thinking a lot about what it is that I want to do with my bass playing and where I would like to take it. Its been only 3 years and by any metric, Im still really bad at this. I'm not afraid to admit that I know absolutely nothing - I can barely find my way around the fingerboard, I don't know scales or why this or that note works with this and that - but somehow, I'm musical. Sometimes I pick the bass up, sit down and I just let my hands find the music. My SO is saying that I've become really good at just making little musical passages - sometimes they're fast, energetic and other times they're slow and gloomy.
I almost exclusively listen to metal of various genres and sometimes some classical music but my bass playing is SO not that. It's more like jazz or maybe funk. Which is weird. I have taught myself all these metal techniques like galloping and heavy attack and whatever else but when I sit down and play, my sound is quite soft and musical, not riff-y or heavy at all.
I thought that I would be more of a metal machine bassist but no, I'm kind of slow and soft and groovy. Still don't really know what to make of that and what to do with it. Which, I guess, goes well with my whole "dilemma" of playing bass - I started because I wanted to do it earlier in life but wasn't able to, I stuck with it and now it has become a really good and healthy hobby for me.
I thought that making a YouTube channel where I upload music and other videos would be a good way to express myself but even when I have (and I still do have many ideas even right now as I am writing this) ideas that I think are really cool, my desire to actually put it out there is very, very tiny.
I get a lot of satisfaction from interacting here on TB. I have a few people who I regularly write with and a lot of that private communication and the rest of it that is available publicly gives me a ton of my need for human contact in the context of bass/music.
I started to think that maybe I should pick an arbitrary goal like "join an extreme death metal band" and just... Do it. But that would feel like going against everything that I am. It would be forced. I don't want to do that. But at the same time, I have no idea what I am as a bassist and I haven't figured out what to do - if anything at all. It doesn't help that I get 0 satisfaction from completing something musical, like a cover for a song, as an example. I did a few and my goal was to complete and entire album but after doing most of these songs in an album, I realized I got 0 satisfaction from all of this. I did it, I'm glad I did. But if I didn't, it wouldn't matter. But I guess it does exist and it did happen, so maybe I am wrong? I don't know!
Well.
The one good thing that has developed quite recently was my realization that I don't need my pedals because I don't use them and I was playing less when I was forced to go thru them because of what my setup was like. So I put them away and I heard how sloppy my playing was clean, so I've been working on consistency and Im getting better and better.
This is quite long and I don't think I have anything else to say right now, it's all still developing. If someone replies to this that's fine but this is more of a journal note rather than anything else. It was a good idea to write this down somewhere and because its TB and this club, maybe someone will stumbled upon this one day and find it helpful.
Lone Wolf club, after all.