Single Handed Bass

How do you play bass with one hand? I’ve recently had an operation on my left hand leaving my third and fourth fingers encased in plaster. It means that I have rediscovered sequencers and keyboard and sound module programming. I planned to program bass parts I have composed for my original songs into the computer. Although I have an expensive program for my recoding PC I had recently dusted off an old Toshiba 110cs laptop and was using it to edit patches on a Roland synth. I become wistful for the Voyetra Sequencer Plus program I bought for my 286 PC back in the eighties.

In those days most people were using Apple Mac or Atari but even then I predicted a bright future for the PC. I visited an equipment show in 1987 hosted by a recording magazine I purchased every month. I mentioned my prediction to the editor of the mag who disputed my vision of the rise of the PC. The same person is now the editor of an even larger music publication that would not have survived today without its coverage of the ubiquitous PC.

The original disks for the software are 5.25 elephant ear size floppies ( then it was clear that the floppy disk really was floppy) and even though I found a 5.25 drive the copyright protection defeated me. The disk allowed two installations. If you uninstalled the software with the install disk in the drive that would restore one install, however the hard disk and the 286PC had both long since departed. Undeterred I found the Voyetra site on the net and browsed for my old sequencer. Lo and behold not only was it mentioned on the site but the software was available for download, not my version but the gold version with all the extra features my lowly version did not possess. I also downloaded the driver for my parallel port midi driver.

After some tinkering I managed to persuade the Tosh to run the sequencer. It was great to see the old program again. I had forgotten how quick and easy it is to use. There are features I don’t have on more regular sequencer such as looping individual tracks. The real discovery is the bank editor that will download and upload to my Roland and Korg synths and allow me to change the order and the names of patches.

This weekend I created the basic track of an 80’s style version of my crowd pleasing sing-a-along song Taxi using one hand and the bass riffs my left hand wrings from my Yamaha RBX bass The only bass playing I can do is with open strings but I’ve seen Sting do that for a whole riff in The Police – any riff of Sting’s is a riff of mine.