How much influence do your band mates have on your bass playing?

[steve]

We used to play originals, and in general, everyone used to supply their own parts, with occasional suggestions from other members. when writing, someone would bring a riff/part to practice and we'd jam the idea out and work from there. I would have to say our original guitarist was the one with most creative ability.

[HMX]

My current bandmates are giving me full creative freedom really. We're playing covers at the moment but no-one moans when I throw fills in there. We'll be writing originals soon and both guitarists have said that they love it when the bass is doing something 'cool' rather than just pedalling root notes.

[M4L666]

I'm in two bands at the moment.

1- A metal/dancecore band that is lovely. I play bass, and I essentially have complete freedom so long as it fits the song. The keyboardist and guitarist are always perfectionist about each other's parts, but I often ask "is this alright?" instead of being told/asked to change it. They always say "yeah, fine, whatever" though. XD
The way we write is that the keyboardist or guitarist will have a riff and the rest of us will put stuff around it, I normally follow the guitars with harmonies.

2- A punk/ska/grind/blues/metal band, where I play guitar and sing. I tend to write everything, as the drummer doesn't have many ideas and the bassist has just started playing.

Edited January 8, 2010 by M4L666

[ezbass]

I play my way, but I'm always open to suggestions from other bandmates, although their suggestions are rare. For instance we were reworking The Zutons Valerie into a more Mark Ronson type arrangement, the keyboard player suggested a Motown type bass line, seemed reasonable so I did that, but in my style of playing Motown. Not being open to suggestion/influences can lead to stagnation, keep an open mind, but tell them to knob off if the band get too pushy

[silverfoxnik]

[quote name='Happy Jack' post='702514' date='Jan 6 2010, 10:05 AM']Intriguingly, that's the first mention in this thread of covers.

All the bands I've played in were/are strictly covers, no original stuff at all, so there's already a bassline to be played. As long as I play either what was on the original track or something that does the same job, I get no grief from the rest of the band.

The tricky stuff tends to be where it's impossible to replicate the original. For example, the bassline to [i]Long Train Running[/i] is dead simple and surprisingly slow, but in the original mix it's augmented by all sorts of other stuff going on (chiefly percussion) which makes it sound/feel both faster and much funkier than it actually is. It's not uncommon to get a guitarist saying "That's not how it sounds when the Doobies play it".[/quote]
For us, it's a bit more complicated in that we are a covers band but we don't always do the song as the original.. If the song has a very recognisable bassline then of course, we replicate that. But in many instances, we are making sure that the song works within the context of our band.. We always have respect for a well-known song but also want to let the individual abilities of the band shine through whenever possible.

For example, we would never normally do 'Sweet Home Alabama' as we're not really a Rock/Blues type covers band.. But we decided to try it as we imagined U2 would do it..so that's what we did and it works great! We also do 'Tainted Love' but decided to mix the Marilyn Manson version and the Pussycat Dolls version; again, great fun to play around with and it always goes down really well at gigs.

For me it's perfect because we get to play lots of cool songs and can throw in some creativity as well..