The school bass - how bad was yours?

[Dingus]

[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]

Why do you think this country is going down the toilet ? Because kids don't learn the value of bass at school , that's why , and subsequently have no foundation in life . If the National Cirriculum had a bit of Sly and Robbie on it and if every pupil who went out into the World at sixteen could at least knock out a couple of rudimentary reggae basslines then we would be far better equipped as a nation to cope with the challenges of the 21st Century.

At my school we had an Ibanez Blazer , but that got nicked one night and was replaced with a Westone Thunder 1. The amp was an HH guitar amp. I remember every week in music lessons the teacher would focus on a different instrument and ask if anyone played it . When we got to the bass one week my mates cajoled me to get up and play , and I played some basslines from chart songs of the day and it went down a storm . Happy memories . Where did it all go wrong ?

Edited October 31, 2013 by Dingus

[stingrayPete1977]

[quote name='EBS_freak' timestamp='1383227681' post='2261813']


Why would we have bike sheds when we all had drivers darling?
[/quote]
To be fair as posh as that school is you wouldnt want to walk anywhere nearby would you!

[Damonjames]

I do remember it well, even though I was playing guitar at the time. It was a brand new ('94 I think) red squier p bass with a black scratch plate. Played ok from memory, and sounded ok through the white Roland bass cube 30 we had!

[lurksalot]

[quote name='Leonard Smalls' timestamp='1383208470' post='2261452']
Nobody did music o level (I'm that old!) at my school, or at least there was a tiny minority. IIRC there were some recorders... Though we did have a (brief) 6th form band playing Neil Young-ish stuff, with me on keyboards and Lurksalot's brother on bass!
[/quote]

And the bass he played was my old hand-me-down , I seem to recall it was the first bass to make an appearance in the school , mainly for assemblies , till you youngsters got ideas above your station

[aj5string]

Im Head of Music at a secondary school so we are fairly well kitted out bass wise :-) Only started in September but we have 4 Ibanez GSR's, and 6 no name Jazz copies that sound OK. Ampeg BA108 amp, Peavey Tour 400 amp... also, 5 JamHub setups, loads of squire strats and steel string acoustics, Fender Mustang modelling guitar amps... Yamaha electric kits, Sonor acoustic kits.... Behringer PAs in each room.

All new too!

Kids are loving it!

[CamdenRob]

[quote name='aj5string' timestamp='1383280501' post='2262525']
Im Head of Music at a secondary school so we are fairly well kitted out bass wise :-) Only started in September but we have 4 Ibanez GSR's, and 6 no name Jazz copies that sound OK. Ampeg BA108 amp, Peavey Tour 400 amp... also, 5 JamHub setups, loads of squire strats and steel string acoustics, Fender Mustang modelling guitar amps... Yamaha electric kits, Sonor acoustic kits.... Behringer PAs in each room.

All new too!

Kids are loving it!
[/quote]

Excellent stuff...

[Thunderbird]

We had nothing at school really there were a couple of old keyboards and a couple of old bashed up 6 string acoustics and a few recorders and maracas only the kids who had well off parents did any kind of proper music such as the violin or electric guitar as they bought there own instruments and did paid after school lessons.

[CamdenRob]

[quote name='Thunderbird' timestamp='1383290535' post='2262550']
We had nothing at school really there were a couple of old keyboards and a couple of old bashed up 6 string acoustics and a few recorders and maracas only the kids who had well off parents did any kind of proper music such as the violin or electric guitar as they bought there own instruments and did paid after school lessons.
[/quote]

Thats true, my folks certainly couldn't afford music lessons... I had a Saturday job in a cheese shop when I was 13 to buy first my bass... I was into metal at the time and they gave me a rather fetching green hair net to wear....

[SpaceChick]

I was allowed to borrow a Cor Anglais for a week from a posh school the next town to allow me to play it in the school production of Fiddler on the Roof. That was as near to a bass clef instrument I got until I was a grown up!

No electric instruments in our school apart from two keyboards in the soundproofed practice/composition rooms. And yep, we played Axel F on it too

[Leonard Smalls]

[quote name='lurksalot' timestamp='1383261315' post='2262452']
And the bass he played was my old hand-me-down , I seem to recall it was the first bass to make an appearance in the school , mainly for assemblies , till you youngsters got ideas above your station
[/quote]
I remember it was an old Hohner violin bass with rubber strings... Was it ceremonially burned?

[CamdenRob]

[quote name='Leonard Smalls' timestamp='1383294064' post='2262594']
I remember it was an old Hohner violin bass with rubber strings... Was it ceremonially burned?
[/quote]

Rubber strings? nice... I bought a fretless recently that was strung with nylons... felt like playing a bunch of chives...

[Norris]

When I was at school any instrument that used electricity was taboo. There were no rehearsal rooms, let alone the stuff you get in schools these days.

Having said that I bought my first ever bass guitar from my old music teacher - a 3/4 scale Kay SG copy with an action that could be measured in feet.

[Dingus]

[quote name='aj5string' timestamp='1383280501' post='2262525']
Im Head of Music at a secondary school so we are fairly well kitted out bass wise :-) Only started in September but we have 4 Ibanez GSR's, and 6 no name Jazz copies that sound OK. Ampeg BA108 amp, Peavey Tour 400 amp... also, 5 JamHub setups, loads of squire strats and steel string acoustics, Fender Mustang modelling guitar amps... Yamaha electric kits, Sonor acoustic kits.... Behringer PAs in each room.

All new too!

Kids are loving it!
[/quote]

What's the point in teaching kids how to play modern electric instruments when you can't leave school and go on the dole anymore? Back in the 1980's you could leave school and then spend years watching daytime T.V and practising your instrument in preparation for your big time music career that was just around the corner . Nowadays IDS wants to get them stacking shelves in supermarkets for minimum wage as soon as they leave the school gates . If they had tried than on my generation there would have been a revolution .

I cannot help but notice the direct correlation between the declining quality of British popular music and the changes in emphasis in schools and society at large designed to make young people more useful to employers. Back in the late '70's/1980's you had mass youth unemployment and The Smiths , the Cure, the Specials ect. Now we have all these work schemes and sanctions and the cumulative result is Coldplay. What cruel trick are we playing on these kids by giving them basses and pretending they will ever get time to play them ?

Edited November 1, 2013 by Dingus

[neepheid]

Fat and contented, nothing to gripe about, eh? Subvert it - gripe about having nothing to gripe about. Aha!

[Chris Sharman]

Our school had a cheapo no-name precision copy that looked like it had been used to hammer the first years into the ground. One of them took it home for a weekend to strip the paint off an varnish it. Only when it re-appeared did we find out it was actually made from plywood.

I have to admit that the Encore P-bass I bought was a step up from that.

However one of the music teachers lent me his Vox White Shadow fretless to do a recording and I have always had a thing for fretless basses ever since.

[clauster]

I was really lucky.

When I started the music had a Japanese EB/SG copy that belonged to one of the Maths teachers. Towards the end of my 1st year the head of music was looking to put together a band for the school's musical productions (mostly written by him). He found out I was an aspiring bassist and asked me to audition. I passed.

Over the Summer break he blew a large part of the departments budget on a used Fender Precision. Sunburst with a maple neck and some lovely birdseye figuring. I played that bass for the next 3 1/2 years. It was great. He also added an electric bass tutor to the roster of visiting instrument teachers.

Then he sold it and bought a Westone Thunder 1a. Nice bass, but not what you want to be playing for the first time in your O-level practical

[alyctes]

I'm old enough that it was classical-instruments-only if you wanted to do music at GCE or A-level. (I think back then I agreed, as well. What a ditz I was.)

[the_skezz]

We had a bunch of keyboards; anyone wanting to learn anything different had to bring the instrument in themselves. Whenever I'm cleaning schools for work now and I see the number of instruments in the music rooms I always make sure to have a good moan about how different it was back in the day...never mind that I left school five years ago and most of the other workers are in their 40s/50s

[flyfisher]

When FF junior started having bass lessons at school I let him take my MIJ P-bass to school to use. It was my only bass at the time (my collection has since doubled ) so I must have been mad, but it didn't come to any harm.

[Greggo]

My college bass was awesome! Was a home built p bass copy finished with like a fence panel staining and had strings on older than the building I'm sure! Recorded a few tracks with it and it did actually sound quite good to be fair. Actually borrowed it before I owned a bass and it did get me interested in learning the bass proper.

[bluesparky]

We had a new p-bass copy and a Marshall 25 watt amp bought for the school music department just as I started my music gcse.
It was no means a coincidence that I was literally the only music gcse pupil my school had, I got on with the music teacher really well and I wanted to learn to play the guitar.
He said "would a bass do?" as he couldn't justify buying an electric guitar, so I said yes and became a bass player.
It was perfect to learn on and I think it was a tanglewood if I remember correctly.
I also mentioned my mate wanted to play the drums, a 5 piece kit arrived the next week!

[lurksalot]

[quote name='Leonard Smalls' timestamp='1383294064' post='2262594']
I remember it was an old Hohner violin bass with rubber strings... Was it ceremonially burned?
[/quote]

Ah yes , that was my first bass that I let Mike have when I got my upgrade (a P of some sort I recall) , but I think he traded it in when he got his Ibanez , ( that he still has , though it is rusting up now ) .

Bizarrely , I only bumped into the guy I bought the Hohner from the other week , I sold him a house full of windows for his mums house, small world I guess

[Spoombung]

Electric instruments and even acoustic guitars were not considered real instruments when I was at school. Pop music was not considered music at all and none of the teachers knew what Top of the Pops was.

Corduroy trousers, chalk dust and Mozart were very popular, however.

[Mr Arkadin]

[quote name='Spoombung' timestamp='1383565682' post='2265841']
Electric instruments and even acoustic guitars were not considered real instruments when I was at school. Pop music was not considered music at all and none of the teachers knew what Top of the Pops was.
[/quote]

Wow, that's not the first quote on this thread to say that. Very sad, but I guess reflective of the times.

I hit secondary school (comprehensive: probably called high school or acadamy now like it's America or something) in 1979, so Gary Numan had blown the synth world into the mainstream. Luckily our art teacher played guitar and loved hi-tech and let me bring my Moog Rogue in to use on some recordings, and remember one rock opera he wrote (yes, we had rock operas!) where we hired a Jupiter-8 that got stared at a lot (it was big, it was expensive) and we overused the polyphonic portamento no end because we'd never heard that sound before. The piano teacher ended up playing it.

As to the bass, I remember it being at my home a lot as I had a four-track cassette recorder and could actually overdub parts. It was black, it was semi-acoustic. Probably no-name (I don't remember the name anyway) and the strings that had probably never been changed. I used to record it plugged straight into my four-track as I had neither a bass amp or a DI (and would have had no knowledge of DIing back then). I must have given back as I'm such a hoarder I would still have it.

Edited November 4, 2013 by Mr Arkadin

[bartelby]

My school had a full size (4/4) double bass, with 2 strings, kept in a cupboard that had about 30, stackable, chairs stacked infront of it. You could open the door just enough to see the DB.

Whenever the music teacher was asked about it he basically said there was no sodding way he was dragging the thing out.
He was only 4' 10" mind...