Greetings and Salutations!
I would love to say that I am a newbie bass player, but I haven't even gotten to that point yet! Despite the fact that I have long LONGED to play guitar, I never quite got around to picking it up. I had always thought it more flexible and sociable than piano, which I had HAD learned to play. Well, sort of - if you count years of learning classical pieces by practicing them into muscle memory for performance at recitals as "learning to play."
I never really understood the relations of the chord structures I was committing to memory or what they meant in terms of I, IV, V, or V7th which is how they were labelled in my notebook. Essentially, I could read music well enough to match the stuff on sheet music to keys on the piano and, given enough hours of practice, eventually translate that into some impressive sounding music that makes my instructor look skilled in the later performances at a student recital.
But even my understanding of musical notation was never intuitive enough to grasp how what I was looking at would SOUND without first plinking it all out and mathematically calculating the rhythms. Sight reading ability was easier for me to do in a single vocal melody line and nearly impossible in a complex piano part with two hands and chords. Oh, how I envied the people who could sit down and just PLAY something upon request, even making it up as they went along...
Music is generally poorly taught all around, I think.
I had a short stint in grade school with the violin, which I happily traded for piano so as not to offend my own ear with the scritchy scratchy sounds of amateur technique on a stringed instrument. Piano, when played poorly, at least never sounds quite as bad as other instruments which require more coordination than pushing the key to create a pleasant tone like woodwinds and strings. Wrong notes were just the ones that didn't get the correct key pushed, not that pushing the key ever produced an out of tune note unless the instrument itself was out of tune.
But piano instruction was just my aunt and some simple tunes and exercises for a few years, and then later a highly in demand neighborhood teacher who happened to be my friend's mom. She took me in as a student at a discounted price, which I had always thought was because of the friendship. It was only recently that it occurred to me that I was a desirable student, despite my reluctance to practice, because I was a very talented performer.
Recitals, you see, were showcases of the work produced by the instructor. They were always organized in the order of performance from novice to the most advanced, with those students who had been studying longest performing at the end to give people a reason to stay through the renditions of "twinkle twinkle" or whatever in the first third of the show. Even when I joined the ranks, I began somewhere in the middle, and quickly ended up in the final third of the program. I had a knack for the musical FEEL of things, and a flair for performing so as not to choke under pressure. So I could make even a simple piece a more impressive one in recital than a more complex piece played by another less skilled but technically more advanced student.
But I always felt like part of the audience myself by that time, having learned the piece so well that I would sort of start with my hands in the proper position and just begin, and then listened to my fingers do whatever they had been trained to do without thinking about it. I haven't touched a piano for more than a decade but if I tried right now, I could at least make it through the first section of J.S. Bach's Invention No. 8 before my fingers forget what they are doing, and maybe even all the way through C.P.E. Bach's Solfegietto with only a couple of hitches. The thing is, for all the years of piano that I played throughout my school years, the only thing I have to show for it is a handful of pieces that I liked enough to play them every now and then so they stayed embedded in my fingers. I couldn't even make myself useful at a Christmas party to play along with the caroling if I wanted to.
But music has been a constant for me, necessary even. Through dance and singing or just listening. I really started to get a bit more of a deeper understanding of music in college after a single semester of music theory as a class, no instrument required, just THEORY. I wanted to know more, but never got to continue that formal sort of instruction since I transferred out of that school.
I DID get to join an a cappella group once I got to my new school, and THAT did wonders for my understanding of how music WORKED, in a way. I fell in love with how do wop groups would sound and how the barbershop quartet at my old school would combine funny skits into their shows. But the best thing about college a cappella groups was how they would render modern pop songs that I knew with their own voices.
Through hearing every sound in the context of the human voice alone, I began to hear each voice of the background music as a separate part instead of a mashup musical wall of instrumental sound where maybe only the drums would stand out as a separate thing. In hearing each separate note of a chord through a trio of voices, it was more obvious how each note moved from one to the next in a progression and see how each voice had its own melody within it.
Previous to this experience, though I sang in a chorus nearly every year at school and in some separate madrigal groups too, I could not have improvised a harmony to anything. I had to be taught whatever part I would sing as a separate thing. Then one morning after being saturated with a cappella renderings of familiar songs that I discovered in a whole new way, I woke up and understood that I'd had some kind of epiphany during the night, and suddenly could improvise a harmony to anything. I have no idea what triggered this fundamental change, but it was a paradigm shift for me.
Throughout all of this, I had only thought vaguely of picking up guitar as a hobby, thinking it would "be nice to learn", and it was all rather academic and really only acoustic in consideration. And then came the Playstation. Guitar Hero. Holy crap. That game made me like songs I never would have listened to, appreciate songs I had always disliked, and in a weird roundabout way has made it a much bigger tragedy to me that we lost Prince before I had a chance to see him perform live. Now I REALLY wanted to learn to play guitar.
Well, actually, maybe BASS guitar.
The thing that had frustrated me with a cappella and my own voice was a physical limit to how low I could go. There was a fella in my college choir that I fell in love with the instant he spoke, thanks to that rumbling low baritone reverb of the way he said "hello". I am jealous of Bobby McFerrin and the range of tones he has to play with in his voice in a song like "Thinkin about your Body." And Sting, whose children I would bear in a second, in concert every time makes me actually want to BE a bass guitar. Something about that sound, down there in the basement, is the foundation of my connection with music and everything else.
That bottom is the foundation, and with it the drums, they are the rhythm which drives the heartbeat of a tune. Interesting that one of the my most intensely favorite songs is "When Doves Cry" which actually HAS no bassline per se, but it's there anyway in the drums. I also love the thunder of the Taiko drummers around Bon Odori time, which aren't that far a cry from the tribal rhythms of the Native Americans and African drum circles. That sound of the Ladysmith Black Mambazo that I so love, and Johnny Clegg and Savuka. That is all right where I LIVE.
And then my boyfriend's parked car got hit by a stolen Hummer one day, which happened to belong to a bona fide rock star, who presented him with a guitar and an amp as a way to make up for the pathetic offering made by the insurance company as compensation. And hanging out with him and his girlfriend was beyond fun, and he suggested we might try writing some stuff together (and then he went a little nuts before that could happen because of terrible people who stole a lot of money from him and he lost his house, but that is a whole other story which has yet to play out, as we have lost touch for the moment, but I hope that he will sort things out all right.)
Then my boyfriend's friend got Rocksmith for Christmas, which he then left over at our house. I had no more excuses, it was time to do something. But the first questions when starting up Rocksmith are of course, what do want to play? And I had to be honest, I want to play bass.
So I stagnated a little longer until I got really bored and fed up with my life not going where I want and almost making it to the stage in the final season of X Factor (I got all the way to the end of the producers rounds in Los Angeles, and I think song choice might have had a lot more to do with not being selected than anything. If they would have gone just one more season, I would have been there in front of Simon et al, I just know it. Unfortunately, I am too old for Idol.)
And then some Facebook meme about filling your life with the things that you love to do, and the ridiculously viral video of a woman delighted with her Chewbacca mask that she bought lit a fire under me and cranked up the urgency of the idea that I need to be playing bass, because I would love it, and I would be GOOD at it, and it would be the gateway to my maybe doing some writing on my own (having gotten a small glimpse of how it might be done thanks to my bf's car getting hit, I think it might be key for me to give a musical shape to some of these ideas in my head.) Anyway, it really started to feel like it was time to do something, so I started looking at maybe renting a bass to try it out.
But no one knew anything about that, no matter where I inquired, so I was kind of at a loss. I don't have a lot of money, and as I wasn't really sure I could handle a bass, I didn't want to sink cash into it if it was not a sure thing. But then I found out there were some cheap options available, if not the greatest instruments, they wouldn't be as expensive as I'd imagined at first.
And then I ran into the biggest hurdle yet. The thing that has been keeping me from actually starting this project is the overwhelming amount of choices that I am totally ill equipped to make! Who knew there were so many bloody different kinds of guitars to choose from? Terminology alone was like how they used to describe getting an education at MIT : "like trying to drink from a fire hose." But I was determined, and patient enough to wade through it for days, watching videos trying to decide if I like the P or J sound better, and consulted countless guides on what to look for in an instrument. And tried to figure out if I wanted to go with a five string instead of four right from the start, since I will undoubtedly eventually want that extra low B if I stick with it. Lost of that consulting landed me here on this forum more than once.
And miracle of miracles, something happened all at once when I stumbled onto the existence of a 5 string short scale bass that was within reach of my budget and also a promising solution to the concern I had about the weight of a 5 string being too much for my tiny frame (only 5'2"). I went to various shops to hold whatever I could to get some kind of feel for the various instruments, but the more info I got, the more I was drawn to the idea that Ibanez Mikro 5 string might very well have my name on it. I can;t find one to actually hold, but my heart tells me that is where its at, and that I am ready to commit to ordering one, Suddenly all the vocabulary seemed to coalesce into something I could understand in the context of that particular bass guitar. I even love the way it looks.
I want. THAT one.
And it's my birthday (Aug 16th - close enough.) I haven't even closed the tab on the browser with it in my shopping cart ever since. It's still open now... waiting.
For what, then?
*sigh* *shakes head*
I had forgotten why I never did get around to trying this sooner, which had a lot to do with the fact that when I did look into it before, the instrument choice was secondary to the primary overload - AMPLIFIERS and EQUIPMENT. GOOD GRIEF! I can't sort out any of that. And the only reason I am not buying the Mikro right now is because I don't know if I need to grab a cheap practice amp to go with it, or if I can use any of the three that have somehow turned up at this house. (Fate has seen to it that we have acquired a little battery powered LA-5, a plug in Fender "Squire 15", and the huge Roland JC-120UT -that one from the rocker- but seriously between these showing up along with a twelve string acoustic Yamaha, the universe is really trying to tell us something about how SOMEONE living here needs to be playing guitar.)
So anyway, that is where I am at right now. I'm not getting scared off it this time though. I decided that all I need to do is figure out if I even need to grab that Eden USM Microtour amp along with the bass before I buy it. So among the first questions I meant to ask here at TB was how one can tell from specs if an amp can deal with a bass guitar input or not? If any of the ones I already have will suffice, that would be a tremendous help but I can't tell how to tell and I don't want to blow them up to find out the hard way that I need a different one.
But I figured it was only polite to introduce myself first.
Hi. I'm from Los Angeles, just turned 44 (ugh), and I can't wait to become awesome at playing bass. Because, oh yes, I DO intend to be awesome at it. I am a woman who has always wished she could sing that low, but I figure I can maybe make the guitar do it for me. I'd much rather be in the basement than the rafters.
I know that is all way too much information. But turnabout is fair play, and the guitars did it to me first.
So there.
=)
I would love to say that I am a newbie bass player, but I haven't even gotten to that point yet! Despite the fact that I have long LONGED to play guitar, I never quite got around to picking it up. I had always thought it more flexible and sociable than piano, which I had HAD learned to play. Well, sort of - if you count years of learning classical pieces by practicing them into muscle memory for performance at recitals as "learning to play."
I never really understood the relations of the chord structures I was committing to memory or what they meant in terms of I, IV, V, or V7th which is how they were labelled in my notebook. Essentially, I could read music well enough to match the stuff on sheet music to keys on the piano and, given enough hours of practice, eventually translate that into some impressive sounding music that makes my instructor look skilled in the later performances at a student recital.
But even my understanding of musical notation was never intuitive enough to grasp how what I was looking at would SOUND without first plinking it all out and mathematically calculating the rhythms. Sight reading ability was easier for me to do in a single vocal melody line and nearly impossible in a complex piano part with two hands and chords. Oh, how I envied the people who could sit down and just PLAY something upon request, even making it up as they went along...
Music is generally poorly taught all around, I think.
I had a short stint in grade school with the violin, which I happily traded for piano so as not to offend my own ear with the scritchy scratchy sounds of amateur technique on a stringed instrument. Piano, when played poorly, at least never sounds quite as bad as other instruments which require more coordination than pushing the key to create a pleasant tone like woodwinds and strings. Wrong notes were just the ones that didn't get the correct key pushed, not that pushing the key ever produced an out of tune note unless the instrument itself was out of tune.
But piano instruction was just my aunt and some simple tunes and exercises for a few years, and then later a highly in demand neighborhood teacher who happened to be my friend's mom. She took me in as a student at a discounted price, which I had always thought was because of the friendship. It was only recently that it occurred to me that I was a desirable student, despite my reluctance to practice, because I was a very talented performer.
Recitals, you see, were showcases of the work produced by the instructor. They were always organized in the order of performance from novice to the most advanced, with those students who had been studying longest performing at the end to give people a reason to stay through the renditions of "twinkle twinkle" or whatever in the first third of the show. Even when I joined the ranks, I began somewhere in the middle, and quickly ended up in the final third of the program. I had a knack for the musical FEEL of things, and a flair for performing so as not to choke under pressure. So I could make even a simple piece a more impressive one in recital than a more complex piece played by another less skilled but technically more advanced student.
But I always felt like part of the audience myself by that time, having learned the piece so well that I would sort of start with my hands in the proper position and just begin, and then listened to my fingers do whatever they had been trained to do without thinking about it. I haven't touched a piano for more than a decade but if I tried right now, I could at least make it through the first section of J.S. Bach's Invention No. 8 before my fingers forget what they are doing, and maybe even all the way through C.P.E. Bach's Solfegietto with only a couple of hitches. The thing is, for all the years of piano that I played throughout my school years, the only thing I have to show for it is a handful of pieces that I liked enough to play them every now and then so they stayed embedded in my fingers. I couldn't even make myself useful at a Christmas party to play along with the caroling if I wanted to.
But music has been a constant for me, necessary even. Through dance and singing or just listening. I really started to get a bit more of a deeper understanding of music in college after a single semester of music theory as a class, no instrument required, just THEORY. I wanted to know more, but never got to continue that formal sort of instruction since I transferred out of that school.
I DID get to join an a cappella group once I got to my new school, and THAT did wonders for my understanding of how music WORKED, in a way. I fell in love with how do wop groups would sound and how the barbershop quartet at my old school would combine funny skits into their shows. But the best thing about college a cappella groups was how they would render modern pop songs that I knew with their own voices.
Through hearing every sound in the context of the human voice alone, I began to hear each voice of the background music as a separate part instead of a mashup musical wall of instrumental sound where maybe only the drums would stand out as a separate thing. In hearing each separate note of a chord through a trio of voices, it was more obvious how each note moved from one to the next in a progression and see how each voice had its own melody within it.
Previous to this experience, though I sang in a chorus nearly every year at school and in some separate madrigal groups too, I could not have improvised a harmony to anything. I had to be taught whatever part I would sing as a separate thing. Then one morning after being saturated with a cappella renderings of familiar songs that I discovered in a whole new way, I woke up and understood that I'd had some kind of epiphany during the night, and suddenly could improvise a harmony to anything. I have no idea what triggered this fundamental change, but it was a paradigm shift for me.
Throughout all of this, I had only thought vaguely of picking up guitar as a hobby, thinking it would "be nice to learn", and it was all rather academic and really only acoustic in consideration. And then came the Playstation. Guitar Hero. Holy crap. That game made me like songs I never would have listened to, appreciate songs I had always disliked, and in a weird roundabout way has made it a much bigger tragedy to me that we lost Prince before I had a chance to see him perform live. Now I REALLY wanted to learn to play guitar.
Well, actually, maybe BASS guitar.
The thing that had frustrated me with a cappella and my own voice was a physical limit to how low I could go. There was a fella in my college choir that I fell in love with the instant he spoke, thanks to that rumbling low baritone reverb of the way he said "hello". I am jealous of Bobby McFerrin and the range of tones he has to play with in his voice in a song like "Thinkin about your Body." And Sting, whose children I would bear in a second, in concert every time makes me actually want to BE a bass guitar. Something about that sound, down there in the basement, is the foundation of my connection with music and everything else.
That bottom is the foundation, and with it the drums, they are the rhythm which drives the heartbeat of a tune. Interesting that one of the my most intensely favorite songs is "When Doves Cry" which actually HAS no bassline per se, but it's there anyway in the drums. I also love the thunder of the Taiko drummers around Bon Odori time, which aren't that far a cry from the tribal rhythms of the Native Americans and African drum circles. That sound of the Ladysmith Black Mambazo that I so love, and Johnny Clegg and Savuka. That is all right where I LIVE.
And then my boyfriend's parked car got hit by a stolen Hummer one day, which happened to belong to a bona fide rock star, who presented him with a guitar and an amp as a way to make up for the pathetic offering made by the insurance company as compensation. And hanging out with him and his girlfriend was beyond fun, and he suggested we might try writing some stuff together (and then he went a little nuts before that could happen because of terrible people who stole a lot of money from him and he lost his house, but that is a whole other story which has yet to play out, as we have lost touch for the moment, but I hope that he will sort things out all right.)
Then my boyfriend's friend got Rocksmith for Christmas, which he then left over at our house. I had no more excuses, it was time to do something. But the first questions when starting up Rocksmith are of course, what do want to play? And I had to be honest, I want to play bass.
So I stagnated a little longer until I got really bored and fed up with my life not going where I want and almost making it to the stage in the final season of X Factor (I got all the way to the end of the producers rounds in Los Angeles, and I think song choice might have had a lot more to do with not being selected than anything. If they would have gone just one more season, I would have been there in front of Simon et al, I just know it. Unfortunately, I am too old for Idol.)
And then some Facebook meme about filling your life with the things that you love to do, and the ridiculously viral video of a woman delighted with her Chewbacca mask that she bought lit a fire under me and cranked up the urgency of the idea that I need to be playing bass, because I would love it, and I would be GOOD at it, and it would be the gateway to my maybe doing some writing on my own (having gotten a small glimpse of how it might be done thanks to my bf's car getting hit, I think it might be key for me to give a musical shape to some of these ideas in my head.) Anyway, it really started to feel like it was time to do something, so I started looking at maybe renting a bass to try it out.
But no one knew anything about that, no matter where I inquired, so I was kind of at a loss. I don't have a lot of money, and as I wasn't really sure I could handle a bass, I didn't want to sink cash into it if it was not a sure thing. But then I found out there were some cheap options available, if not the greatest instruments, they wouldn't be as expensive as I'd imagined at first.
And then I ran into the biggest hurdle yet. The thing that has been keeping me from actually starting this project is the overwhelming amount of choices that I am totally ill equipped to make! Who knew there were so many bloody different kinds of guitars to choose from? Terminology alone was like how they used to describe getting an education at MIT : "like trying to drink from a fire hose." But I was determined, and patient enough to wade through it for days, watching videos trying to decide if I like the P or J sound better, and consulted countless guides on what to look for in an instrument. And tried to figure out if I wanted to go with a five string instead of four right from the start, since I will undoubtedly eventually want that extra low B if I stick with it. Lost of that consulting landed me here on this forum more than once.
And miracle of miracles, something happened all at once when I stumbled onto the existence of a 5 string short scale bass that was within reach of my budget and also a promising solution to the concern I had about the weight of a 5 string being too much for my tiny frame (only 5'2"). I went to various shops to hold whatever I could to get some kind of feel for the various instruments, but the more info I got, the more I was drawn to the idea that Ibanez Mikro 5 string might very well have my name on it. I can;t find one to actually hold, but my heart tells me that is where its at, and that I am ready to commit to ordering one, Suddenly all the vocabulary seemed to coalesce into something I could understand in the context of that particular bass guitar. I even love the way it looks.
I want. THAT one.
And it's my birthday (Aug 16th - close enough.) I haven't even closed the tab on the browser with it in my shopping cart ever since. It's still open now... waiting.
For what, then?
*sigh* *shakes head*
I had forgotten why I never did get around to trying this sooner, which had a lot to do with the fact that when I did look into it before, the instrument choice was secondary to the primary overload - AMPLIFIERS and EQUIPMENT. GOOD GRIEF! I can't sort out any of that. And the only reason I am not buying the Mikro right now is because I don't know if I need to grab a cheap practice amp to go with it, or if I can use any of the three that have somehow turned up at this house. (Fate has seen to it that we have acquired a little battery powered LA-5, a plug in Fender "Squire 15", and the huge Roland JC-120UT -that one from the rocker- but seriously between these showing up along with a twelve string acoustic Yamaha, the universe is really trying to tell us something about how SOMEONE living here needs to be playing guitar.)
So anyway, that is where I am at right now. I'm not getting scared off it this time though. I decided that all I need to do is figure out if I even need to grab that Eden USM Microtour amp along with the bass before I buy it. So among the first questions I meant to ask here at TB was how one can tell from specs if an amp can deal with a bass guitar input or not? If any of the ones I already have will suffice, that would be a tremendous help but I can't tell how to tell and I don't want to blow them up to find out the hard way that I need a different one.
But I figured it was only polite to introduce myself first.
Hi. I'm from Los Angeles, just turned 44 (ugh), and I can't wait to become awesome at playing bass. Because, oh yes, I DO intend to be awesome at it. I am a woman who has always wished she could sing that low, but I figure I can maybe make the guitar do it for me. I'd much rather be in the basement than the rafters.
I know that is all way too much information. But turnabout is fair play, and the guitars did it to me first.
So there.
=)
