#HowIStarted
Did I do that right? I don't do the Twitter thing, so I never, ever use the pound sign/number sign/hashtag. Ever. This isn't just how I started, but lots after that, too.
I started playing piano at 9 and did that until I graduated from high school. The problem I had was that the piano wasn't portable and I couldn't sneak off to a corner with it. You could with a guitar, so I got a really cheap and awful one from a pawn shop back when you could get an occasional gem from a pawn shop. I didn't with that one, but so it goes. No lessons, but I started learning and had about two years of messing with it under my belt before heading off to college. In college, there were a zillion guitar players and all of them were a whole lot better than me. There were no bass players. Somewhere early in my second year in college I decided it was time to try bass. It made perfect sense all of a sudden. Bass playing was like coming home, even though my first bass was like playing a broom stick with a bowling ball tied to the wrong end. I didn't think anything about brands, scale length, strings, or much of anything else. I wanted to sound like Ox, but Jack Cassidy or Jack Bruce would have been OK, too. I was fascinated by Larry Graham and even Stanley Clarke, too. There were all kinds of music I was listening to at the time, so nothing in particular was a major influence. I'll get banned for this, but I never paid any attention to Jaco.
The freebass came along about a year later. I got it as a throw-in when I bought a cheap little practice amp. I had been plugging into a stereo. I recall plugging the bass into the headphone jack, which shouldn't work, but that's what I remember doing. Nothing caught on fire, so I guess all's well that ends well. I played the freebass for a number of years, and eventually supplemented the cheap little practice amp with an Acoustic 126 combo that I got just slightly used. I still have it.
In the early 1980s, I managed to trade the freebass, more or less even, for the Gibson EB-2 that I still have. It was my only bass for a very long time, and I never thought about it being fragile, rare, vintage, or anything else. I got it for less than $0.10, effectively, so I didn't think of it as anything special.
After taking the better part of 20 years off to have a family, pay a mortgage, raise a kid, and generally do all the conventional things an American boy is supposed to grow up to do, I started playing again about ten years ago. The EB-2 came out again, and I started getting comments about how unusual it was. At that point, I decided maybe it should have a case instead of just a gig bag. Then I decided it might be a good idea to have another, less fragile bass guitar. The less fragile bass guitar I got was a bolt-on Epi Thunderbird. It needed the upper strap button moved and I played it for a while, then gave it to my son and bought a Fender RW Precision. I put ashtrays and a tug bar on it and have kept it ever since. It's now officially pounded, no longer a bit of a poser.
One of the bands I was playing in had a BL who really liked Rics, so I decided to try a Ric. I found a 1998 for cheap (for a Ric), and bought it. I played it for a couple years, but found myself missing the Thunderbird more and more. I won a "losing" eBay bid for a Pro IV, thinking I would try an active bass and get another Thunderbird at the same time. That one left me cold as far as sound, but I remembered everything I loved about playing a Thunderbird from an ergonomic standpoint. It is now my fretless, with different pickups and no preamp.
Which led to selling the Ric and buying the '91 Thunderbird, which has turned into a flock. They breed, y'know.
The whole route to Thunderbirds was not by design, nor was it because of anybody's specific influence. There was no specific sound that I was going for and trying to recreate. Each bass has it's own sound through each amp, which also has its own sound. I'm tweaking what I like or don't like about each combination, but they are different and entertaining to match with the specifics of whatever the song should have. I fell in love with Thunderbirds because of the way they hang, and the freedom to move them in all directions while playing. They don't dictate where they need to be, like a Ric or a Fender does. If the neck was more Precision size, I would be happier, but you can't have everything. I'll take a smaller neck and adapt in order to play the rest of the bass in a way I prefer.
Now, I'm to the point that anything but a Thunderbird or something like a Thunderbird sounds a little thin. Even the Precision. Sometimes that's the sound I want to hear. The one sound I just can't deal with is a Jazz. Those just don't work for me at all.
