I recently played a bass which felt so right to me that it changed my perception on a number of personal presumptions:

1. Active electronics on basses are not annoyingly trebly and counter-productive to audio engineering, but are actually super useful in creating a variety of real-time live bass sounds in different styles that otherwise require mix edits;
2. Peavey employs some incredible luthiers, and the low-end heavy metal connotation Peavey has attained has more to do with marketing campaigns than actual instrument performance;
3. The Fender Jazz is not necessarily the be-all, end-all bass to suit my playing, despite my loyalty to it.

In short, as a session bassist who plays all styles as well as a composer who is currently working through a combination of minimalism and trip hop pieces, this 5-string bass may become my new best friend.

Here’s a look at my configuration, including the maple fingerboard I prefer, with ash body and wenge top:

I decided that the best way to achieve a ‘human’ performance was for a human to play it. As a six-string electric bassist, I decided that I would prefer to just play these works myself rather than spend the many hours it would take to achieve an adequate MIDI performance.

So writes David J. Grossman, who transcribed various Bach works into midi files.

Getting the notes into a sequencer is not as challenging and as time-consuming as is creating a great sound from virtual instruments. Tweaking velocities, mod wheel expression, switching between patches or inserting the correct keyswitches, humanizing and quantizing and cutting to grooves, making tiny tempo variations — programming a musical interpretation to generate a realistic performance requires all of these, and this is before we even reach the production stage, where we deal with EQ, effects, and more.

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I’ve been openly obsessed with the bass for some time now. I still write mostly on piano and I’ll go to a guitar or fiddle if I’m messing around, but for serious performance I’ve been working at the bass across all the styles in which I’m called to write.

I’m not a technical wizard, more of a dedicated groove performer, but I admire those with technical proficiency on the instrument.

Example: Victor Wooten.

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To clear a head full of orchestral samples, synth settings, sound effects, loops, and whatnot — nice to strip things down to one acoustic guitar. This is Andy McKee.

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I’ve been playing a great deal of bass lately, mostly a blend of jazz and funk lines. One habit I have is going way out of my way to avoid the G string (a four-string bass’s highest string) and instead playing up the neck so that I can hit the same notes on the A string and occasionally D string. Many bassists do this to preserve the rounder quality of the same note played on the thicker string, and the higher tension is palpable, noticeable even to casual listeners (those listeners who wonder what the hell you really do in the band ’cause they swear they never really hear you).

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This is a new resolution which just occurred to me, and I’m going to commit to it. Too often I sit with my favorite acoustic — a Larrivee LV03 — and noodle for too long, which is therapeutic but not actually productive when I have real music to write. I need to stay focused and approach the guitar for sounds and working out rhythms after I already have a clear motif or arrangement to work out. I need to avoid just picking it up and working out random melodies or harmonies — that I usually do on paper or at the keyboard anyway, and when I go to the guitar I meander, undisciplined, searching out things meditatively, which is all fine and dandy but I have deadlines, man! I can’t let everything be subservient to fingers on strings and fretboard.