String Break

I recently auditioned for a band in Woking, Surrey. It was more of a jam but they had given me a few songs to learn although the drummer and the guitar player had not bothered to learn them. It turned out that it was a new band formed by a keyboard player, which was a good start I thought. I have been in many bands over the years who were looking for a good keyboard and none of them ever found one – good, bad or indifferent.

So I’m playing my Yamaha RBX bass through a Peavey stack which is turned up but I’m not hearing a lot of volume. Well its a rehearsal studio rig so maybe its been beaten up and is not very well. To compensate I’m probably hitting the strings of my bass harder and before long I lose the 3rd string, its broken and I have no spares. I check out the reception desk – do they have any strings? No they don’t, I would’ve stocked them if it had been my rehearsal facilities. A rehearsal place I went to in London had a good stock of strings, because its obvious that sooner or later someone will break a string, though usually its the guitar players not the bassists.

I called round at the other rehearsal rooms and was lucky enough to find a band taking a break and a bassist who had the right spare string – result and back to the audition. Our drummer is never seen again after this audition – like many drummers he is in another band or two but unlike the rest he doesn’t like the idea of rehearsal’s very much so he doesn’t bother coming to another one, although technically he is still in the band. At all the subsequent rehearsals he is able substituted by an Alesis SR16 drum machine which has less attitude, a better sound, improved time-keeping and a 100% attendance record.

So we start playing again – and five or was it six songs in the 4th string breaks – it has never happened before – two strings breaking on a bass is incredible. I go in search of my former saviour but this time he can’t help and so I play the remainder of the set with three strings and then my lead packs up so I borrow one from the guitar player. I plug it and straight away the problem of the missing volume is solved as the amp produces one powerful pulse of feedback.

As I now have an assortment of spare strings at I home – whenever I change one I keep the old one I replace the 4th string and all is well.

A few weeks later the band meets again, this time in Guildford, Surrey and everyone is relieved that I get through it with all strings intact. I thought that the band was actually going to gig so I bought a new bass amp.
One day I receive a call from the keyboard player who says that he has joined a band and that if we want to we can keep rehearsing. Well thanks – that leaves a guitar player who can sing but doesn’t make time to practice and a singer, but now since the keyboard player owns the Alesis we don’t have a decent drum machine either. I know that this band is not going to get work and so does he so thats the end of the line.

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.

I have been singing to a bass and drums in my show, I used to play guitar but for some variety I decided to play the bass instead. For one thing its different to what other performers are doing and for another its a challenge to sing and play bass. Now I appreciate much more the talents of singing bass players Paul McCartney , Brian Wilson, Sting, Lemmy, David Paton (formerley bass player with Pilot, The Alan Parsons Project and now Elton John) and Phil Lynott.

I wanted to chose songs that had a distinctive bass line – something that drove the song along. So far I have played the Cream staple Sunshine of Your Love, the Beatles Ballad of John and Yoko and Brian Wilson’s California Girls. You can probably think of many more so why not let me know the tunes that you would play?

I’ve recently started working on Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin – this song is very dependent on the bass line and this and other songs by Zep the bass and guitar often riff along to create a very powerful structure with the drums.

Once again I played my bass centric show with guest drummer Dan Todd coping very well with my ‘ look back at the sixties’ set. We have never rehearsed this set so it was even better that he managed to hold it together. The set is California Girls, Ballad of John and Yoko, Sunshine of Your Love, Jail Bait , Rock and Roll Medley featuring : Going Home, Mean Woman Blues, Blue Suede Shoes and Taxi.

Just when I thought I was doing something completely different to everyone else the next act up borrowed my bass to do a song with another drummer. I don’t know if he had done it before or if the idea came from watching me – really though it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to get out there and play and even if you don’t play guitar there is an audience for singing bass players out there – maybe even a career.

In a time when The White Stripes and Keane have dispensed with a bass player – just as The Doors did before them is the bass guitar an endangered species? Is a six string bass really a bass and how many more strings can be added before the fret board grows so wide that only giants are capable of holding down the bass end of the band?

I have been playing a lot more bass guitar recently. I’m working on a song of my called ‘Movie Queen’ – about the trials and tribulations of a young girl and her mother give the girl a career in show business. I have sketched out the basic part on note paper – I find it quicker than searching for manuscript paper – I write down the note and the octave as a number next to it. So the low F on the bass would be written as F1 while the F an octave up is F2. I use the music notes to indicate how long the note is played for. That is the system that I have invented. When its right I then write it up on the music paper. Its lot easier to read bass music not guitar music – bass usually plays one note at a time and often with time to play to notes rather than firing off notes like a archer in a castle siege that guitarists eventually gravitate towards.

The low E string was buzzing on the frets and I spent some time looking for an allen key to adjust it. I bought a large set of allen keys at the local car boot sale and sure enough one of them fitted the Yamaha bass bridge. A few turns later and the buzz has gone. I play a Yamaha rbx200 which I have owned for twenty years, during one of its rest periods one on the machine heads seized because when I came to use it the machine head broke. I wrote to Yamaha and they sent me a free replacement – kudos and thank to them all – I shall buy another bass and when I do it shall be a Yamaha.

On one occasion I played a set at an open mic with just my bass for company. I called it my tribute to Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney and included California Girls and the The Ballad of John and Yoko along with my own British Boy, it was different and went down well to a slightly bemused audience.

However if a band doesn’t want to include a fat string slapping, pick’n or tapping bass player thats their right but my band needs a bass player. Add as many strings as you like if it covers the bottom end of of the frequency spectrum its a bass to me. Proof of that – if proof were needed is the excellent Bass Guitar Magazine. I am happy to say that the bass guitar is alive and well.