Bass Nerd Stuff

[I've been a horribly neglectful blogger lately — I just realized that I went to the entire month of May without a single post. Ouch. Sometimes life just runs away with all my time, but I'm really going to try to be better...even if it just means posting a shitload of TED videos and short music reviews, if that's what I have to do to keep this thing moving.]

I’ve had bass playing on the brain lately. Ovipositor has been working on some new songs, as well as tackling a few covers — Gene Pitney’s “Last Chance to Turn Around,” MX-80′s “More Than Good” and Velvet Underground’s “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore” — and I’ve also been writing a little on the side over the last few months, churning out a handful of pieces for a noted bass magazine. I’ve been doing gear reviews, but I’ve got an artist feature on deck, and I’m currently auditing the bass certification courses at a reputable music school’s online program for a feature in the same magazine later this year.

Truthfully, I’m not totally pleased with the editing job on some of the reviews — I feel like my own voice has been squeezed out in favor of a more prosaic approach — but whatever, it’s not horrible, I’m happy for the side work, as well as the opportunity to expand my bass palette, and I’ve spent plenty of time on both sides of the editors’ desk, so I now how it goes. Anyway, here are links to some of my most recent pieces:

Electro-Harmonix Bass Big Muff Pi. I actually kept this pedal after the review and use it quite a bit. I like it because I’ve spent so much time running though distortion pedals that are built for guitar, and end up sounding like shit on a bass signal. This one is built for bass, and nicely dials in the classic, gloriously fucked up Big Muff tone for bass frequencies.

Xotic X-Blender. This pedal was cool too, but I didn’t keep it when I was done reviewing it. I’m just not the type of player who would make use of it — it’s an effects loop bypass pedal, which is good for players who have a lot of pedals. I’m a bass player; I look and feel like a fucking tool if I show up somewhere to play with an array of pedals. Gimme a distortion box (maybe a low-pass filter) and I’m good.

Sterling by Music Man. I kind of regret testing this series of basses. Sure, I was unbiased, and yeah, they’re pretty nice basses. But I love my Jazz bass (Fender American Standard), and have spent a considerable amount of time dialing it in the way I want it to sound and feel. Playing other, loaner basses just made me want to play my own. I think I’m done reviewing basses.

Warwick Sweet 25.2 & Sweet 15.3. The editors sugared up this review a bit. Not that I hated these amps, but I definitely had a tough time with them. I think it goes back to what I was saying about those Sterling basses vis-a-vis review gear versus my own gear. In this case, I love my Ampeg amp rig. Anything less is…well, less. Still, I wrote this review from an unbiased perspective, and I honestly put these amps through their paces, and they’re decent little combos. It’s just that what I turned in wasn’t as nice as what ran. But that’s how the game is played.

Bonus Bass Nerdery: A few years ago, I was in NYC on business and had the opportunity to see and film bass player extraordinaire Victor Bailey do a clinic for a Bass Player magazine event at the Millennium Broadway hotel on Times Square. This particular clip blew my mind at the time, and has not yet ceased to amaze me. Bailey rearranged the Weather Report classic “Birdland” as a solo bass piece (with some vocal additions; Bailey played bass in Weather Report after Jaco Pastorius left the group), and his style, while not always inhumanly perfect, is so dope, and so totally soulful, whenever I hit the wall with whatever I happen to be working on, I watch this clip and am reminded that I have a long, long way to go and a lot of room to grow as a bass player:

Watch the rest of this clinic — which is basically six clips of Bailey showing why he’s among the best — over at BassPlayer.tv.

Photo by Thug E. Fresh: me playing with Oviositor at Li Po Lounge, SF.

State of Bass

I’m a bass player (if you couldn’t tell from the subtle references to bass — Charles Mingus and David Wm. Sims — in the masthead graphic at the top of the page), and though I’m certainly no virtuoso or bass shredder, it’s something that gives me a substantial creative outlet, it affords me the opportunity to play out and record, and I can sit and noodle for hours.

Anyway, one of my coworkers, Jonathan Herrera, is the senior editor at Bass Player magazine, and was part of a “Smackdown” debate today on WNYC’s Soundcheck show. He and New Yorker magazine pop music critic Sasha Frere Jones were set to debate what the show’s host, John Schaefer, refers to as the increasing irrelevance of the bass guitar in hip rock music (Sasha on the pro side, Jon on the con). Sounds like Schaefer is reaching a little for debate fodder.

As not only a bass player, but also as a rabid consumer of music, I was skeptical of the topic from the moment Jon told me about it late last week. I mean, seriously, a handful of bass-less bands — The White Stripes, The Kills, The Black Keys, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs — find success and suddenly the bass guitar is becoming irrelevant in rock? Please. Those bands are representative of only one direction of rock music’s evolution, not a fundamental shift in the instrumental makeup of the archetypal rock band.

However, the show turned out to be less of a debate and more of a thoughtful discussion on the state of bass in contemporary, hip rock music. It was cool, definitely worth checking out (if only for the bass-centered humor: “How many bass payers does it take to screw in a light bulb? 1-5-7, 1-5-7, 1-5-7.”)

Peep it on the WNYC site.