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The school bass - how bad was yours?


CamdenRob
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Anyone else remember their school bass guitar.... Ours was truly awful...no name short scale thing that looked like it had been made in the music teachers shed (possibly had), hand painted in olive green, it had had its frets removed and was strung with the oldest flats in existance (three of them - the A string was a roundwound). It seemed to disapear completely after my first couple of years at school, which must have meant it was finally put out of its misery, or inexplicably... someone stole it...

We did have a reasonable DB though....

Rob

Edited by CamdenRob
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School bass. Are you kidding?
I wanted to do o level music but as only one other person wanted to we couldn't
Music lessons were a balding middle aged bloke trying to engage teenagers in 1975 by playing Shadows albums on the education authority style record player which we could make jump by stamping on the floor when he turned his back to draw a crotchet on the blackboard.

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[quote name='lonestar' timestamp='1383206817' post='2261431']
School bass. Are you kidding?
I wanted to do o level music but as only one other person wanted to we couldn't
Music lessons were a balding middle aged bloke trying to engage teenagers in 1975 by playing Shadows albums on the education authority style record player which we could make jump by stamping on the floor when he turned his back to draw a crotchet on the blackboard.
[/quote]

No record player but we did have a number of these....



They were of marginal better quality than the bass....

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[quote name='lonestar' timestamp='1383206817' post='2261431']
School bass. Are you kidding?
I wanted to do o level music but as only one other person wanted to we couldn't
Music lessons were a balding middle aged bloke trying to engage teenagers in 1975 by playing Shadows albums on the education authority style record player which we could make jump by stamping on the floor when he turned his back to draw a crotchet on the blackboard.
[/quote]
The Shadows? I would have loved to have been able to listen to artists as modern as them in our music lessons! :unsure:

We were made to listen to composers such as Bach, Mozart, Brahms, etc..
Yes, I know they were great composers, but being a teenager at school when The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, etc, were just starting to hit the music scene, classical music was the last thing us 60's kids wanted to listen to.

As for the school band? no chance for kids like me, only the posh kids who had their own cello's, wind instruments, or were lucky enough to have had piano lessons got anywhere near it, and of course, it was all classical stuff anyway, so of no interest to most of us.

To be quite honest, I think that our music teacher just wanted to have an easy time, he would put on a classical record, sit at his desk with his eyes closed obviously chilling to the music for the full 30 minutes, he never taught us anything about reading or understanding music in any way. :(

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No such thing back in black and white days.
However, I do know from younguns that things aren't good.
Nothing wrong with having value instruments,but, surely they should be ,at the very least, be reasonably set up ?

No doubt inspired by " Cool Uncle Rock and Roll", nephews and god daughter have taken up bass at school and I've lent them a bass for practice/ill fated band projects. Guess what? Having something playable helped, a lot. And I eventually got the bass back!

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[quote name='thebrig' timestamp='1383208297' post='2261447']
To be quite honest, I think that our music teacher just wanted to have an easy time, he would put on a classical record, sit at his desk with his eyes closed obviously chilling to the music for the full 30 minutes, he never taught us anything about reading or understanding music in any way. :(
[/quote]

Ours was the ethereal Miss King... took us all out onto the field for our first lesson with an acoustic, sat us round in a circle and sang to us...

She left after being caught smoking something dubious in the teachers lounge...

Edited by CamdenRob
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Didn't have anything like that. I didn't study music at school because the teachers were a bit erm... intense shall we say. Also it was classical or nothing and I just wasn't interested.

I got a job, bought a bass and taught myself.


THAT bass was a shocker though! :o

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School bass? What school bass? I played some recorder at primary school and we had some (probably classic and cool now) Casio keyboards at secondary. Cellos and violins were the order of the day for instrumentation for folks who took it seriously IIRC (I didn't do music at school beyond second year).

If I knew then what I know now and all that.

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There were no electric instruments of any description at my school.

School music lessons consisted of 45 minutes of listening to classical music records with little information about them other than the composer's name and certainly nothing about why the piece was important from either a musical or historical perspective. Pop and rock wasn't considered to be proper music and was ignored unless a current chart hit had used a piece of classical music (Greg Lake's "I Believe In Father Christmas" use of Prokofiev) in which case it would grudgingly get a mention - mostly sneering at the artist's inability to create anything that didn't require a big chunk of "proper" classical music to make the song work.

There were opportunities to learn an instrument in order to be part of the school orchestra (so I imagine it would have been possible to learn the double bass). However when my turn came I said I wanted to try the trombone (I can't remember any reason for this choice) which lasted as long as it took to discover that at the age of 12 my arm wasn't yet long enough to reach the furthest extent of the slide. And that was it. No effort was made to find out if there was an alternative instrument I'd be interested in learning on which I would be able to reach all the notes.

Instead I went and joined a "folk guitar" evening class held at another school where there were girls - even if I didn't have any idea how to talk to them. The rest as they say is history...

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[quote name='CamdenRob' timestamp='1383212435' post='2261502']
There seems to be a shocking lack of bass representation in schools if this thred is anything to go by... Think I might donate one to my local school...
[/quote]
Great idea and very generous of you, but you'd better donate an amp too or its going to be a white elephant.

In my school there was no bass. Misic lessons were a teacher playing Carpenters records while the class did their homework for other subjects.

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