Me, like every other amateur or semi-amateur musician (I lost my amateur status long ago,) when faced with the prospect of being locked down for some extended time, promised myself that I would get to the shed and improve my chops.
I started well, working with Strum Machine at least 4 or 5 times a week. Not for hours but for reasonable amounts of time a session. I worked on arpeggios both major and minor on a regular basis. Using the arpeggio work, I wrote basslines for some swing tunes I was working on with one of my advanced jam groups at the shutdown. Not to toot my own horn but things were cooking and all was well in the woodshed and with my chops.
Over time though, as days turned into weeks and weeks into months things changed. I’ve heard it described as pandemic fatigue but I’ve chosen to name it pandemic pandemonium. I’m self-diagnosed with either or both of these. Mine manifested itself in moving from shedding to buying a cheap iOS interface for my iPad and starting to record my basslines in GarageBand. It didn’t matter to what end. I was just recording. I would spend my afternoons trying to record my bass, changing variables to try to get “true” sound, I used different mics and different placements. I tried my pick-up in place of mics but the “true” sound was elusive and from my perspective I wasn’t even in the “true” sound neighborhood.
Playing one bassline over and over again trying to get he sound right wasn’t really doing anything for my chops and as one would predict, they began to decline. Only slightly at first but this is where it started.
Other than driving me to my tequila bar. I started thinking about what I needed to do in order to get the bass sound I wanted recorded. Read this carefully, I didn’t let go of recording and jump back to the woodshed but chose a different very slippery path and when I might have been better served by working on playing better. I kept drinking and decided I needed better gear to record with and became a gear junky. I bought OS interfaces for my brand new MacBook that came installed with Logic Pro X for an additional $300. Next up I began acquiring preamps, cords, stands, monitor speakers, head phone, tripods, Bluetooth remotes and more I’m sure. Luckily, I had a few good microphones left over from my farmer’s market gig days. Oh yeah did I mention that I added video to my new obsession. At least I had my iPhone X and my iPad pro with high res capabilities so I only needed tripods and stands…so far.
I bought enough gear that I ended up getting a Christmas card from Jeff Bezos and I have my own personal sound engineer tech with Sweetwater.
You might be thinking so what, is that so bad. It was definitely keeping me off the streets (along with a surging virus I might add) but if I could afford it, no harm no foul…except that every minute I spent recording or making videos was a minute I didn’t spend in the woodshed. Let me repeat that, every minute spent on recording and video was a minute I didn’t spend playing bass. It is no secret, no play, no chops! There’s no confusion there.
I attribute the above maniacal shift in focus to my short attention span that kicks in after 10 minutes while working on a repetitive task like playing scales or arpeggios on my bass. Recording was and is new enough for me to keep my interest piqued for some longer periods of time.
So how did I discover my chops issue? I mean I’m not playing out with anybody to compare, so how did I discover my deteriorated chops? Ironically it was trying to record a couple of simple bass parts for some holiday season videos I made, with Linda, for our grandkids mostly and it took me multiple takes on each of these songs to get the parts down. I’m not going tell you what the songs were but rest assured none of them was Handel’s Messiah. There is evidence of all this on YouTube.
What am I going to do about the chops situation? Well, besides drinking some tequila to help me develop a plan, the only solution I see is get my rear end out of the recording studio and back to the woodshed (which by the way are the same space) and manage my time better. I’m hoping to need my chops soon. You know, vaccines and the like, and then maybe some jamming. I don’t want to be put back in the slow jam.
Thanks for bearing with me. I’ll see you next month. In the meanwhile, stay sane, I see some light down the pike.
