Why did you start this?

[chris_b]

The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, Pretty Things and Animals were a bad influence on everyone in the 60's, and I was going to the party.  I was going to be rich, cool and famous. In  any order!

 

The  Spanish guitar my parents bought me had an action you could fly a plane under. I couldn't press all 6 strings down at the same time, so no chords, just single notes. A friend and I got together to play songs and all I could do was single notes. He showed me the bass lines and hey presto, turns out I could do that. The penny dropped and my course was set.

 

An electric bass (Framus Star Bass, small body) followed the next year, an amp and my first band followed the year after. Two years after that I was a professional musician. Many decades have passed and I'm still fired up every time I pick up my basses (Sadowsky and Mike Lull).

Edited 4 hours ago by chris_b

[Stub Mandrel]

2 hours ago, Mediocre Polymath said:

At the time, I thought of myself as unteachably inept at any sort of physical skill – I was crap at sports, a risk to myself and others in a workshop and had displayed a spectacular lack of musical ability throughout my childhood. I figured trying to play an instrument again would just be setting myself up for embarrassing failure. 

 

I still feel 'imposter' syndrome about my bass playing. It feels like I've got away with this huge bluff.

[Skinnyman]

This journey, into bass playing? What made you pick up that first bass at the start of this long and winding road?

When I was about 6 or 7 I heard Bert Kaempfert’s A Swingin’ Safari and Ladi Geisler’s bass just captivated me. From that day I wanted to play bass - wind forward forty years and my mid-life crisis finally gave me the impetus to actually learn…

 

Do you still have the same fire and enthusiasm? Do you still love it?

 

I still love it but the enthusiasm to play has been tempered by the realisation that I’m not actually very good and I now spread my lack of talent thinly across lots of instruments rather than just being poor at only one. 

 

What has changed along the way? Your taste in music, taste in basses?

 

I used to be a bit of a music snob and wouldn’t listen to a lot of stuff. Learning to play and being in a few bands has widened my appreciation and there’s not very little I don’t like. 
 

What was the first bass? And what’s the latest? 

First bass was a Tanglewood that was quite decent to learn on. First “proper” bass was the Ric 4003 I’d always promised myself and which I got as soon as I knew I was going to stick with it. Since then dozens of basses have gone through my hands and all of them have now gone with the exception of that first Ric (which I will never sell) and a bitsa SG Nanyo Bass Collection that I’ve recently brought back from the brink and is now my go-to recording bass because it sounds so….fat-but-focused if that makes sense. 

[Dad3353]

1 hour ago, Jackroadkill said:

Relent!

 

Are you General Clamour..? 

 

...

 

 

[Stub Mandrel]

I should have mentioned (confessed)  my latest bass - a Kay Gremlin.

 

I suppose starting on a Kay guitar, I feel sorry for them- I have a Kay Tulip too.

[Stub Mandrel]

2 minutes ago, Dad3353 said:

 

Are you General Clamour..? 

 

...

 

 

 

Or Sgt. Rock?