Happy Jack

Just starting out in 2006, I found a bizarre thing in a Denmark Street music shop ... it was a tiny electronic tuner with a spring-loaded clip which you could attach to the headstock of your guitar or bass! Amazing! Who knew such things existed? So I bought one and it was on my bass when I first played at a jam session. All evening, the more experienced musicians were coming up to me to look at it, go 'tut' and tell me it looked dreadful, then walk away shaking their heads. The following week, pretty much all of them had one on their headstock.

Mine just arrived. Only time for a quick test before heading up the road to Northampton ... so far all good.

Mind you, it's not just the punters. At a very well-known music venue in Dunstable, the owner/manager came over during the break, grabbed the sticks from the snare, sat down and started drumming. Really really badly.

At Ye Olde Swan in Burnham (a pretty lairy venue) I came back from a load-out trip to find a drunk lying down inside the gigbag for my DB and pretending to be dead.

So long as that band is a bunch of 15-year-olds trying to replicate the punk spirit of 1977. Otherwise, some ability and experience might come in handy.

Ray, if you PM your address to me I'll send you a couple of books that I found immensely helpful 13 years ago: Crash Course Bass by Stuart Clayton (a Basschat regular) and Blues Bass by Ed Friedland. It's been a while since I needed them. Jack

A couple of suggestions: Firstly, playing along with your favourite records is one thing, playing in real time with another musician (even just a single guitarist) is a very different thing and a very different experience. If you monitor things like https://www.joinmyband.co.uk/ (other websites are available) then pretty soon you'll find an advert placed by a guitarist or a drummer who is looking for a bass player to jam along with at home. Secondly, once you're up to speed with playing in real time with another single musician, don't be too quick to start applying to join bands. You're very likely to get knocked back for your inexperience both as a player and in band situations, and that can get very depressing. The natural halfway house between quietly jamming at home with a guitarist and joining your first proper band is to spend some time frequenting the local jam sessions and open mics. Your best bet is to find a blues jam, where most of the songs to be played are, essentially, 12-bar blues. How long does all this take? Well I picked up a a bass for the first time on my 49th birthday at the end of December 2005. By the summer of 2006 I was routinely jamming with a local guitarist. Autumn of 2006 I started attending a well-known & well-attended blues jam. Summer of 2007 I joined my first band but by Xmas we still hadn't played a gig. Spring of 2008 I joined another band and I played my first-ever 'proper' gig on 29th May 2008. Best bass-related thing I ever did was to discover Basschat (or, more accurately, one of its predecessors). I would never have been able to make the progress I made as fast as I did without a huge amount of advice and encouragement from this community. These days I play 60 - 80 gigs a year, all for decent money, with a couple of decent bands (see my sig). It's never too late ...

Now in all fairness, that's not my fault. I was perfectly happy with Dancing Spiderman until Ped and Charic stole him.

Sometimes you need to give a big hug to the people you hate. That way you'll know how big a hole to dig.

Basschat hasn't been the same since The Big Beef Chief was banned ...

OK, so @Silvia Bluejay isn't IN the band but she is - quite literally - married TO the band.

True, though hardly impossible. More to the point, I already have 60 gigs booked for 2020 ...

Good Grief! That place sounds like my worst nightmare. Did you get offered a 'pod' for the night?

Got another band lined up?

I imagine that he has friends on Basschat, and it's not like he's out of the band because we hate him ... we had hoped for an amicable parting and to remain friends afterwards. Who knows, maybe there'll be a reconciliation some time.

Yup. That's what Jimi Hendrix said, alright.

I just pulled the trigger on the Elbee 1210, because it's such a bananas design ...

And ain't that the key? This is supposed to be fun. If you're not enjoying it, chances are that you're not doing what's best for you.

Lots of well-intended advice here, but a surprising amount seems to be about building strength and tightening your grip. That may well be the answer to all your problems, but in that case you'd be the polar opposite to me. Playing bass involves keeping both hands and their fingers under more-than-usual tension for long periods. What I need is not more tension but more stretching to loosen everything up. As an experiment, try this. Use your left hand to stretch back each finger (and the thumb) on your right hand, one by one, as far as is comfortable with the web between fingers feeling the stretch. Don't overdo it, don't hurt yourself. Then reverse hands. Repeat this randomly all day while you're watching TV or staring idly into space, and see how your hands feel later.

Solo, duo, 3-piece, soul band with brass section and fully-landscaped Gospel group singing harmonies ... it's all music, it's all gigging, it should all be fun. Let's all kiss and make up, OK yah?

Why thank'ee, thank'ee kindly Zur ...