How did you start playing bass

#41
I began playing horns in the third grade- moved from trumpet to French horn, Eb horn, baritone, valve trombone... wound up on tuba! Became enamored with bass guitar at age 14 when I heard my first RUSH album... bought a RIC at age 15- learned a bunch-o-RUSH albums... the rest is history! (these pics have been seen quite a bit on this forum- but here goes again)

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#42
1975 listening to Santana and Dave Brown thinking it's not that hard and was feeling pretty good about myself...so I played and put the bass down because I didn't feel the commitment within myself. Fast forward to 1977 me and two buddies were getting lit and one of my friends put on Jon Luc Ponty Enigmatic Oceans and played Struggle of the Turtle to the Sea Pt.3 and I was blown away. Ralphe blew me away. Since that day I've shed every spare minute I get just trying to increase my knowledge bit by bit.
 
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#44
MichelD said:
The background is a little complex so I’ll stick to basics.

I played a little acoustic guitar and knew maybe four chords. I had been playing just over a year and didn’t know anything about licks or riffs. I may possibly have been able to play “House of the rising sun” by then.

This was 1969 I was 17 and living in a small town on the coast of BC and met two other teenagers spending the summer in Canada who happened to be from Mendocino California. One was a drummer and one was a guitarist.

They wanted to form a group while they were living on a piece of rural land clearing trees for one of their dads to build a house. They needed a bass player and I got talked into it.

Only we had no bass nor was there one anywhere in the neighbouring villages to buy, beg, borrow or steal. So I borrowed a Harmony Meteor electric guitar and we took the two high strings off, borrowed a Sears amp and turned all the controls on the guitar and amp to “Bass.”

The guitarist then set to showing me bass patterns and I spent the summer memorizing them. I didn’t really “learn” to play bass that summer, but was taught the notes and learned them by rote and repeated them.

I had no ear for chord changes at all and actually 49 years later still struggle with that. But He showed me the basic boogie woogie pattern in A and I memorized a lick for “Season of the witch” and I learned “Wipe out” and “You really got me” and similar songs.

The guitarist really had a hard time with me because I couldn’t figure out the changes to the blues without memorizing how many times each pattern had to be repeated before switching to the next chord.

“You have to feel it, can’t you just feel it?” he said repeatedly. Well no, I didn’t and couldn’t.

Like I said before, I had never played single note licks before on anything, just chords, so I had to learn how to make my fingers move around and hit one note at a time.

Well, by the end of the summer we had enough songs together to play one gig; a dance at the local community hall and it was a great success.

I returned the Harmony to its owner and didn’t get a bass until 7 years later when my first wife bought me a fretless Japanese Jazz bass copy off a Czech political refugee who had taken up banjo. I still have the bass. And the wife. You keep a woman who buys you a fretless electric bass.
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I started out playing guitar mostly folk music which required finger picking. With the technique I used, I played the bass parts with my thumb. A few years later, our 6th grade class had a talent show and I did a couple of numbers.

My teacher came up to me afterwards asked me if I could play bass parts like that on a bass. He had a polka band on the side and needed a bassist. So with a borrowed bass started a lifetime career and avocation. BTW, I was knocking down $40 a gig back in 1966, at age 13. Sure beat mowing lawns, washing car, or running a paper route.
 
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#46
I played rhythm guitar for almost fifty years and was often told to take up the bass because I had good tempo and feel, but I didn't want to be encumbered by a large electric bass, forget a stand up/double bass. Then I joined a seniors ukulele group about 4 1/2 years ago and about a year later the leader asked if anyone would like to learn bass to fill in our sound. I went home and found all the U-bass and other sub-short scales available and decided to go for it. As noted in my signature, I'm now up to eighteen 21 to 24 inch scale basses (and 8 ukuleles, I love GAS), and BTW, I've not touched my guitars for these 4 1/2 years.
 
#47
I was a struggling guitar player trying to find my way in a pseudo punk kind of band with buddies. At the same time, I was becoming more enamoured with bass players. I couldn't afford a bass, so I kind of kept at it, just to be in a band. There were a lot of great guitarists in LA in the mid 70s. Lots of great players, and lots of want ads for bass players. I was starting to see the light. I knew nothing about making a musical instrument, but it didn't matter. One day I took the little money I did have and bought the smallest bass strings the store had, turned the nut on my Silvertone guitar upside down and chopped up a wood block for the bridge. Drilled holes in the body for the strings and started playing my new makeshift bass lol Never regretted that decision.
 
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#48
My sister had an acoustic and I found six strings too confusing (what *** is up with that B string?)

But my brother had a '72 Univox bass that literally cost $75 with a 10 watt 8" speaker no name amp. It didn't even have a truss rod to adjust the neck. I think they bought it from one of those ads in the back of a comic book where they advertised X-ray Glasses and Charles Atlas workout programs with some guy kicking and in your face.

All he ever learned to play was a few bars of White Room, Inagodadavida, and If 25 Was 6 to 4. He abandoned it almost immediately and 2 years later when I was 12 I picked it up and started taking lessons.

Two years later the neck eventually twisted (no wonder it was such a steal) so I pulled all the frets out and messed around with it as a fretless for a bit then bought a brand new (well, my parents bought it, I was 12, I didn't have any money) 1977 Rickenbacker 4001 for $500. The neck was too big for my little stubby dwarf fingers so in 1988 (I'm a slow learner at times) I bought one of the first issues of the Ibanez Sound Gear line, a SDGR100 for $1,000 and I've been hooked on Ibanez basses ever since.

It's been a 42 year addiction to four strings ever since.
 
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#49
Growing up tried guitar several times. Just didn’t work with my big paws. Years later in my early 20’s I was in Atlanta at Blues Harbor in underground ATL, listening to the guitar, keys, and saxophone but realized my whole body was moving with the bass. Being a numbers guy or maybe the reasoning of Makers Mark thought bass has 1/3 fewer strings should be easier. Bought bass and amp the next day and never looked back.
 
#50
Was a flautist and somehow thought the natural extension of that, to expand my performance, was to pick up the bass to learn better rhythm and timing. Sold that bass and continued with flute for years. Picked up a new bass and it felt better so I started playing again. Got a good bass and now am a bassist.

Once I get a fretless the "real playing" will begin.
 
#51
I started picking out melodies on our Baby Grand at age 5. Started playing Trombone at age 9 with lessons reading bass clef and later in school band. My older Brother played a MIJ bass my parents bought at the Two Guys in Totowa, N.J. around 1968 for a couple of years, then switched to guitar. When I was about age 10, he bought a second guitar (1966 Guild Starfire V, I later inherited). My father said: "why don't you give one of your guitars to your brother?" He gave me the bass and my life was never the same!
 
#52
I tried to make a sweet sound with an old acoustic 6 string but never got the hang of it. The strings are too small and couldn’t ever get the feel. Got the guitar in early 70s and tried on and off for the next 20+ years. No luck

Fast forward to the mid 90s.

My daughter learned clarinet in middle school. After the initial screeching phase, she got pretty good. In high school, she switched to bass clarinet and made all-state band three years in a row. She decided at some point that she wanted to play electric bass. I purchased a 4-string MIM Fender Jazz with a small practice amp. She played with the bass for about a week till she realized it didn’t match her musical interest and she concentrated on the clarinet.

Too bad for her, great for me!!

I picked up the bass and have been hooked ever since. I‘ve played almost every day since. It’s my escape from a high stress 9 to 5. Sad to say I sold the Jazz to try different Basses. But I still have and use the little practice amp.

And I still have the acoustic 6-string. Still can’t play that, unless I’m playing bass lines on it.
 
#53
1970, 8 years old, 3rd grade...got an acoustic guitar and 8 weeks of lessons for my birthday.


1973, 11 years old, joined school band playing alto sax.


1975, 13 years old, switched to tenor sax in school band.


1976, 14 years old, switched to baritone sax in school band...and have been jammin with guys every night at a friend’s house, 4 sometimes 5, all guitar players...at the time i kept thinking "we need a bass player"...and i play a bass clef instrument already...ok I’ll do it. So I bought a “global” jazz bass copy at the local g.c. murphy dept store for $69 and an “acoustic” bass amp for $50. we kept at it for a long time that way.


1978, 16 years old, high school marching band, baritone sax...still playing bass.


1980, 18 years old, i hear from a friend that he knows a guy who knows a guy that's in a band in the neighborhood that needs a bass player. so i go check em out and i know some of em, i audition, get the gig and we go on to play together for a few years, win a battle of the bands competition and get to go into the studio and record 2 songs.


1984, 22 years old, I’m asked by a friend from elementary school (who had seen my band before) to come to his bands rehearsal to hear them play, so i go and realize I’m being recruited, they ask me to bring my drummer tomorrow night, i do and we both jump ship and join a new band. Which leads to lots of gigging and a studio project....during that project some good music was recorded but the band ended up destroyed in the process. i decide to take a break from playing for a while.


1990, 28 years old, a friend asks me to come help some friends of his in a band with their monitor system. So I go help and meet these guys, a Danish band that just arrived in America a few weeks earlier…so I continue to help these guys with sound and lights for a while when their bass players visa runs out and he has to go back to Denmark. So I step in and become their new guy, we record a cd, tour all around the country for a year and then our singer says he has to go home, his parents are sick, he ain’t coming back. So we break up. It’s 1995 and I decide to take more time off…..22 years.

2017, 55 years old, I find an old bass in a closet, it’s a bass I was building back in 1995…I play it for a few minutes and think “ I wish this bass had some pickups in it and I had an amp”. a few weeks later I buy a bass and a small practice amp….that was 10 weeks ago and I have been rehearsing with my new band for 2 weeks now…I’ve had severe GAS the entire time and now have 5 basses and 2 complete stage rigs…


Somewhere along the line I realized being in a garage band was fun…being in the machine that is touring and being away from home for a year, isn’t fun. It’s a job….now I’m back to the fun part.
 
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#53
I'd liked the bass role in some of the other local high school middle school bands. So I bought a department store teisco rig. Met some guys freshman year, three guitars, drummer and myself. We got together in a bassment, and learned six songs. House of the Rising Sun, Midnight Hour, My Girl, Hey Joe, Heatwave, and Wipeout. Six month later we were playing school dances.
 
#56
Have you noticed that so many of the posts end with, "…and never looked back!"

My bass story started in church. They were switching over to worship teams which was cool, but something was missing… no bass. I put down my guitar, picked up a Yamaha BB 300 at the local music shop…and never looked back.

People sometimes ask me how long long I've been playing. I always know the answer because it's the same as my daughter's age. When she was a newborn, and I was just starting to learn bass, I would grab every moment to practice a few lines. It turns out she became colicky, so I'd put her in the snugly, strap on the bass kind of to the side and move with the rhythm while learning my parts. This quieted her down so we sometimes spent hours together while I practiced. I've always felt this is one of the reasons we have a special bond. She's 26 now.
 
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#57
In 1979 or 1980 I saw a photo of a man holding what seemed like the sexiest thing I had ever seen. I finally found out who that guy was. I had never heard of his band but bought an album. I played it thousands times.
 
#58
Started playing guitar on summer break from school. School started back up and I wanted to try out for stage band on guitar. They already had a guitar player that was a year older and asked if I would play bass. I said okay and played bass for 3 years in high school. The school owned a copy of an EB 3 with what seemed like 1/2 inch action. Thinking back on it, I don't know how I played the damn thing. Shortly after i bought a Gibson Ripper and then when i was 18 a 65 jazz. Should have kept them, lol.
 
#59
Feb 9, 1964, I was 7 and I saw the Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan show. That turned me on to music.

Then, in 1971, I heard Chris Squire "grinding away" on his Ric 4001 in the song Yours Is No Disgrace on The Yes Album. After hearing that, I knew I had to play bass. I started playing bass the following year (1972 at age 16) and I have been playing bass ever since!

Btw, in 2000, I was playing bass in a YES tribute band, and I ended up meeting Chris Squire (and the other YES members). Chris and I talked about Ric basses. That was a real honor for me! RIP Christopher Russell Edward Squire!
 
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#60
I worked for a construction company in Denver in the late 90's. Real slave-driver culture, even in the engineering office. Construction was booming and we worked all the time. 60 hours a week minimum,hit 80 a few times. (I really mean that, I had a sleeping bag at the office). So myself and a group of my co-workers were just really burnt out after almost 2 years of this. We would get together by the water cooler about 6pm before essentially our second shift started (we were all salary) and we would make elaborate jokes about the big boss. We never actually met the guy, but we would see him around when he wasn't golfing or schmoozing. Real schmarmy little weasel with gross over-sized gold jewelry... he looked like a tiny little pimp, and that's basically how he made us feel working for him. (I later worked with him in a consulting capacity; he really was a lazy loser, just as we thought). Anyway, someone said we should write some of these rantings down...comedy gold. The someone said we should make them in to songs. A third person said "lets start a band". So we did. The best guitar player in the room wanted to play drums, and the other two guys could play smoke on the water than me on guitar. I am kidding; I wanted to play the bass. Always a huge fan of the bass. Jack Bruce, Geddy, Entwistle, JP Jones, all heroes of my dads record collection. Also my old man had messed with the bass a little; he had an EB style sears roebuck model, and I knew a basic blues line and a couple seconds of gimme 3 steps. But that was the beginning. Went out and bought a Mexican jazz and a crate amp on my 26th birthday (or something like that). I started playing in a band that week. Needless to say, it was 3 chord, sloppy, low speed punk rock.
 
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