Either way, I hope you enjoy this most recent bass-driven chapter of my musical development. I certainly do, even if it is still feeling a little rough to me. I began taking lessons last September, which, despite being several months ago, feels very recent in the grand scheme of things.
The original purpose was to learn enough to augment my own recordings, just so. I've enjoyed casually collaborating live with various bassists and knew I wanted to incorporate it in my work. However, playing live and developing a recorded sound are different beasts. I wish my joyfully experimental attitude toward playing live more easily translated to polished recordings, but I struggle with capturing enthralling sounds that also feel like myself to me.
Perhaps outwardly it looks collected and intentional, but my sense of self is often squishy, twitchy, and transient. My process is intuitive and messy and I don't often know what I'm looking for until I've found it. It is already a challenge to navigate my own mental landscapes, let alone bridge the chasm to someone else's in order to excavate Something Right.
That sense of Rightness becomes hard to come to terms with when a record feels so permanent, but my humanity, inextricably linked to my artistry, is capricious. One of the hurdles I continuously have to overcome is that I can't control other people's perceptions. Everyone has their own unique perspective, and I have limited influence over content and context.
To quote Rick Nelson's "Garden Party," "You can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself.
My latest "working" body of recordings have been painfully stalled in the care of well-meaning volunteer collaborators. My tried and tired "throw things until they stick" approach would be prohibitively expensive with a session bassist. In the end, I'm ultimately responsible for my own project's momentum.
I already had the proclivity to thumb out a striking line or two on the lower strings of the guitar. It made more sense to hire a teacher.
I've just begun my 7th month of lessons with Seth Horan, who I can't recommend strongly enough if you're thinking of taking on-line bass lessons in the privacy and comfort of your own home. The student through whom I learned of Seth described him as "insanely talented" and "a gem of a human being," and I concur. Besides being a font of knowledge from his extensive career experience, he is engaging, sensitive and... mostly patient. The lessons have felt delightfully tailored around my writing practice, when he isn't overtly cultivating the music theory I neglected during my self-education in guitar and ukulele.
It should probably surprise no one who knows me that the learning process quickly developed into a writing and performance practice. I'm grateful for the various mic communities who have heard me falter through my early solo bass experiments and encouraged me, anyway, but especially Easyfolk Media, the power behind the weekly Thursday night open mic at the Haymaker. Easyfolk's mission is to support independent artists by facilitating live performance opportunities through building community and the creation of live music videos. I'm honored and humbled to be one of this year's Easyfolk Featured Artists.
