The Bass Geek

The new IMN podcast is up and ready for download.  You can also listen to it on the Flash player at the main site.

I also stumbled across this quick interview with George Porter from a Denver publication.  The interesting parts of this article include the fact that he’s still owed quite a bit of royalty money (please pay up - he made a lot of musical careers possible) and that the jam band folks have adopted the Meters and associated music as their own.  On one hand, it’s nice to see these acts with large crowds that give them a decent living.  On the other hand, please take a shower before you go to the shows, and stop twirling into me.

Yes, it’s a heart-shaped bass. Yes, I am that cheesy. But I also ask you to ponder this hypothetical situation. Take an instrument like this and plop it into the future identity crisis that is Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus. Make the endorsement deal happen. Then, sit back and watch the explosion. I’m talking the bass guitar becoming an overnight status symbol and fashion accessory the likes of which haven’t been seen in decades. Stings and pickups debated with the passion and intensity of Britney vs. Christina (Christina won, by the way). Vera Ashley gig bags dominate the market. Fox picks up a new teen drama that’s just like “The Heights,” but they focus on the bassist this time.

Ponder that world for a minute.

Then go back to whatever you were doing before. It’s not worth a terrible amount of effort, really.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Sam’s Saloon has Will Woodrow (excellent bassist - played a homemade upright constructed from PVC at the Bass Appreciation Night last year) and Chained Fate tonight and a singer/songwriter event tomorrow night. Radio Radio has Orquestra Bravo (SALSA!) tonight.

I’m stuck on some writing projects this weekend, but I’m trying to make some time for these shows, the Naptown Roller Girls bout Saturday night, and a viewing of the new DVD from solo bassist Seth Horan. And for some reason I’m dumping all of my Frank Zappa stuff to my iPod compulsively. Dunno why.

Mike Watt, late of the Minutemen and Firehose and now with the Stooges, fairly defines what a punk bassist should be - makes the songs work, plays memorable lines, and always goes all-out. Thsi article found him ruminating on the “Watt Commandments” of bass:

The bass has got some righteous karma and politics—you look good making other cats look good, and the more notes you play, the littler you get. It’s an eternal struggle for the right notes. Which I think should never be solved.

My favorite is this quote:

In the bathroom, people look at the tile—I look at the grout! That’s the way I relate to the bass, too. I don’t try to be too definitive. It’s funky about the bass. I see a guy with a righteous bassline and I wanna meet him—‘I really like that bassline!’ And I find out the guy’s been playing two months because his buddy made him! That’s how righteous it is! You can write good basslines when you’re just starting. It’s not the most notes—it’s the right notes!

I get the point, and it’s a great one. I’m still never going to look at my bathroom the same way again.

And then there’s this one:

In the old days, there was a huge hierarchy and bass is where you put your retarded friend, the right-field little leaguer—in punk, everybody was lame, so the bass equaled out. So I try to tell them . . . ‘A lot of times you ain’t gonna be the one writing the songs, but there are a lot of ways to do it.’ The instrument is still in a stage of mystery and self-realization.

For most rock and pop music, he’s exactly right. And it’s the last part of the statement that’s kind of exciting to me.  Historically speaking, the bass guitar is young.  Infant young.  Whereas most of the orchestral instruments have widely accepted pedagogy, musicians like Stanley Clarke are just now starting to put together more structured and refined ways to play the bass guitar.  That means things are still wide open, whether it’s finding a bassist’s role in a rock song or trying something totally experimental, like Squarepusher.  I’m sure a lot of the effort will end up in the compost heap, as scraps best used for creative fertilization of the next round of ideas, but that’s a great place to be.

We’re starting to record some more songs for the Warner Gear, and we’re going to look at some different ideas for recording the bass.  Last time, we ran it through a SansAmp Bass DI direct into the computer - we’re going to stick with this setup, but we’re going to toss in quite a bit more highs and crank up the “presence” knob a bit.  We’re thinking about some advice “Duck” Dunn put forth in “Bass Player” magazine a few years ago (and there’s really no better source) about tossing in every frequency and letting it get adjusted in the mix.  After all, it’s easier to take frequencies out than to boost them when they’re not there.  I don’t normally cut them in my playing, but we’re thinking it might make things easier down the line.  Last time, we also did some faux “tic-tac” bass sounds using an old Danelectro (it just sounded right on some of the songs).  I’m not sure the material is leaning that way this time, which is another reason to try increased high-end.  We should be doing bass and drums in the next few weeks, so I’ll know soon.  Duck wouldn’t lead me wrong, though.Is it wrong that I’m contemplating this issue while watching a bass lesson about slapped arpeggios?