Fingers and the audience

[Monkey Steve]

ooh, good thread

I'm another one who has always understood "it's all in the fingers" not to mean that you will always sound (for want of a better phrase) "tonally" identical no matter what you are playing, but rather that regardless of how good or expensive a bit of kit you are using, you won't become a better player because of it, your phrasing won't magically improve because you've got a much "better" bass.  You will sound like you playing a more expensive bass.  And as someone who uses an assortment of different techniques I'd be pretty annoyed if my slapping sounded like me picking or the couple of different finger styles I switch between depending on the sound I want for a particular piece.

But I've seen the opposite belief more than a few times, that using a better instrument will make them a better player, mostly in guitarists - very average players chasing that one guitar or amp that will magically transform them into a brilliant player.  One in particular used to watch YouTube videos of players that he rated, and rather than sitting down to work out how they were playing the music he liked, would instead go and buy the amp or guitar they were using in the belief that not using the same gear was the one thing holding them back.  He used to turn up with a new amp almost every month - amazing that with every change of amp it never once occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't the tools that were at fault but a bad workman.  And to be clear, he did always sound like him - the tone may have varied, but his phrasing was always the same, and the mistakes always sounded like mistakes.

But that brings me on to point 2.  It may well be that the audience don't notice the difference between instruments, but that's largely because they don't know what the difference is: as long as it sounds OK, or even as long as they don't think it sounds bad, then they're happy, and that's all they should be worried about.  However, if the bass makes a difference to you and your playing because it's "better", even if it's not tonally but a confidence boost, then that's a win for everyone.  I remember the bass player in an old band of mine where I played guitar upgrading from a Squire P to a US Fender P - I thought the sound was noticeably better (more punch), and it was certainly true that it gave him much more confidence, albeit that his playing wasn't any different...but not once did anybody in the audience (and we played a lot of the same places every few months and chatted to the audience a lot) make a comment about any change or improvement in the bass sound, probably because it was fine to begin with.

I always remember a (very good) guitarist telling me, when I was staring out, that a better, more expensive instrument won't make you play better, but it will probably respond to better playing, that it will allow you to play better if you have the skills.  Perhaps "better" isn't the right word - maybe "fittest", in the same sense as Darwin uses it in "survival of the fittest" - not meaning the strongest (as people who misunderstand the phrase think) but as in "the best fit" for the particular situation.  If we stopped worrying about whether one bass is "better" than another and concentrated on which bass is the "best for me"