Bass lessons

My New Year’s Resolution for 2010, already in progress: I’m going to learn how to play the bass all over again.

I have had a single bass lesson in my entire life. It was about a 15-minute session hurriedly undertaken between quartet and full orchestra sessions while I was still playing upright bass. The upshot of that lesson was that I was doing just about everything wrong. My thumb was completely incorrectly positioned on the back of the neck. The bow hand was a mess. There was no way I was ever going to achieve any meaningful vibrato the way I was fingering my notes. Did I really think I should be using the ring finger? Really? The tone was kinder than this but that was the basic idea.

Most assuredly I remember the lesson, as you can see. But I have continued to ignore every single piece of advice in that lesson to this day. I mean, for one thing, I’m double-jointed, which screws up my technique in any number of ways (including making it entirely too easy to splay out my thumb on the back of the aforementioned neck). For another, my bow days ended after high school; I prefer the control you can only get through fingers and occasionally a pick.

I think most important to me has been the ability to interpret the mood of music and serve songs appropriately. Technique would be nice if I were trying to make some sort of solo name for myself as a bass player, but I haven’t ever been able to imagine myself as that kind of bass player. I have preferred over the last several years to move along a path that has led me to good band after good band and provided me the opportunity to go along and get along.

I’m done with that.

and it simply represents a new phase and a new passion for music that vaguely coincides with two defining events over the last couple of months:

• the loss and near dissolution but quick recovery of my current band, in a configuration about which I’m highly enthused.
• my first Sonic Youth show.

The first I primarily credit with helping me take a step back and figure out why I still want to play music with bands. It’s because there is still great magic to be had in the creative process. That creative process was a difficult animal to wrestle in our previous form, where personal and personality conflicts ruled the day. New membership has brought stability and respect on a level I haven’t yet seen with this band.

I feel I have about a 95% chance of being part of something special even if this band never takes anything outside of the four rehearsal space walls. When you find people with whom you don’t have those very personal trust-related or personality-related conflicts, you can spend more time figuring out who you are as a musician. That’s because the respect is there. The band makes me want to be a better bass player.

It also makes me want to be a more energetic one. Playing in bands has always meant a certain amount of standing in place and making sure I don’t screw up. That’s been an issue with this band specifically. Now I feel I have enough trust, respect, and freedom within this group to jump around, move myself a little better with the stops and starts and swells of the music, and, well, screw up. A lot. And that’s where this process will begin – with plenty of screw-ups and awkward moments. (That’s why it feels so awfully familiar, I suppose.)

Then there’s the notion of what it means to use an instrument, which is where the second major event comes in. This one is about the Sonic Youth show on 11/22 in Boston, where my mind opened to the possibility that I’ve simply been playing bass wrong all this time (sorry, Marshall, it might be true). I witnessed two guitar players I would consider great for reasons way beyond technique. It was really about bending the will of the instrument to your own will (what Sonic Youth does) rather than trying to coax something out of it (what I have always done).

That’s why I never found myself sighing in disbelief when Lee and Thurston changed instruments between songs. My interpretation is that this was their way to circumvent the structure that leads to reams of printed and eventually recycled tablature from the Internet. It wasn’t about learning chords; it was about finding chords in new ways, through new tunings, and freeing themselves to think less about specific fingerings and more about the energy of the performance as well as the specific musical atmosphere they are looking to generate.

With all that in mind, I have in fact been refining and reorienting my bass playing over the past few weeks, a process that now promises to kick into even higher gear.

What’s that going to look like? Will I be revisiting what I vaguely remember from my single bass lesson? No. I’m still ignoring that crap. What I will think about are the following new thoughts:

• The treble knob is not bad. For years, I’ve taken on the formless, shambling persona of the all-bass-tone-all-the-time organ pedal player. I didn’t want anyone to confuse anything I was doing with popping-and-slapping or even post-punk pickmanship; so abject was my fear that I’ve even, during the last couple of years, run my bass through an additional EQ before hitting the amp just to make sure I remove any traces of treble. No more. The treble is an important definer from note to note. This isn’t synth-bass territory anymore. I am an actual bass player and will attempt to sound like one.

• The bass can be a percussion instrument. Within the context of the show and in Sonic Youth’s work in general, I have seen how regardless of tuning or tone (though treble helps), stringed electric instruments can easily be percussion counterpoint for overall song rhythm. When running distortion, I find the chunky percussive sounds of the bass entirely satisfying. I intend to exploit the various ways this can happen – not necessarily with a pick but more likely with my poor long-suffering fingers, which I will continue to use in ways they don’t deserve at this advanced age. See #3.
• There will be blood. In fact, there has been blood at the last two practices. I have been simply abusing my bass. That’s it, no better or other word for it. In the late 90s with my very first band, I played bass with a pick and ended up more often than not with a giant section of skin forcibly rubbed off my forearm due to the picking motion and the placement of my arm. It was partly as a defense mechanism that I eventually moved away from picking and onto fingering. But I’ve discovered that picking doesn’t have to be removed entirely from my vocabulary. Neither does strumming or smacking the bass strings with great force. Indeed, I will be hitting the bass, bending it unnaturally, and simply ripping at the strings whenever I get the chance. I think my Stingray is up to it.
• The strap will loosen. Since moving to fingers almost exclusively, my preferred bass position has been closer to my chest rather than down much closer to my legs. I think this will change considerably, which can be a pretty hard thing to adjust to and may take me some time to negotiate.
• Tunings will change. Probably not right away, but as I play and get even a little more comfortable with my own energy level while playing. Again, the idea is to become less beholden to the structure of the standard bass and make the bass work for me. If I can do that through tunings, and I’m pretty sure I can, why wouldn’t I? Sure beats buying a more-than-4-string bass.
• Whither the Hofner? When the occasional acoustic show comes up, I can make use. But if I’m going to be abusing the bass so very much, is the Hofner really the right tool for the job in most cases? Shouldn’t I have something that is inexpensively rugged instead? Oh, but my Hofner’s so pretty! (to be continued)

You will get both musical and physical (blog, picture) updates of the transition, but I can tell you, it’s underway and it feels great. My thumb still flanges out like the wood on a bow-and-arrow when I put it on my bass’ neck. But I am no more disheartened about that than I am about finding saltine crumbs in a bowl on the coffee table. I eat those up – this challenge I’ll eat up too.