SIMPLE-FI
On scrap of cardboard I wrote down something from Charles Bukowski, “as the spirit wanes the form appears.” When I took this note down I wasn’t entirely sure what was being said, I just thought there was something interesting to the sentiment. With the milestone of 40 on the very near horizon I’ve latched on to this quote. I take it to mean as we age we tend to move towards convention. Perhaps as time progresses and the notion that we may be remarkable fades, we settle for being good. Interchanging “good” with “conventional” we now have a framework in which to grade ourselves.
On scrap of cardboard I wrote down something from Charles Bukowski, “as the spirit wanes the form appears.” When I took this note down I wasn’t entirely sure what was being said, I just thought there was something interesting to the sentiment. With the milestone of 40 on the very near horizon I’ve latched on to this quote. I take it to mean as we age we tend to move towards convention. Perhaps as time progresses and the notion that we may be remarkable fades, we settle for being good. Interchanging “good” with “conventional” we now have a framework in which to grade ourselves.
This tangent will wind back to the point*: I learned music playing trumpet. Having been enamored with the upright bass and reaching the point of aging-out of school band programs, at 19 I bought a bass guitar. My approach to bass guitar was through the framework of trumpet. Which is to say basically thinking of it as a melodic lead instrument. And probably more influentially, when I thought of the electric bass guitar, I though of Mark Sandman and his 2-string slide bass. Which (sorting out as part of my research for this build) is really more of a 2-string slide baritone guitar (frequently tuned in fifths to C-G or D-A he was basically using the 2 high strings of the bass which falls into the low end of baritone guitar although on a slightly larger scale adding a little more heft).
The tangent gets a second paragraph: Over the last twenty years I’ve taken the time to learn the bass after those first few years of playing the bass. You might say I’ve gone a bit conventional. But, I decided I wanted to relearn one of the first songs I played on bass and dug out the ol’ college band’s first recording. First I thought: man I’ve gotten much better at bass these last couple decades. And then I thought: man, I have no idea how to play this bass line anymore. So to wander back to the beaten path, sometimes we start things without the proper framework. Can you break rules that you don’t know? It seems to me that we need to learn the conventions at some point, but then it’s up to us as to whether we will perfect or veer away from that conventional framework.
I’ll wrap up this tangent-chapter with a quote from a recent Tobin Abasi interview with Rick Beato. Regarding a picking technique Beato asks “why did it take so long to come up with these things?” I thought maybe it was a rhetorical question considering that it’s a pretty complicated technique and there aren’t many people at that level. Abasi answers the question with a really interesting response. “I think a lot of people are inspired to play based off music they’ve heard before… you want to recreate the sounds of your heroes—you do what they did, which is the most reasonable thing to do.” (He goes on to talk about how over time innovations become part of the lexicon and it gets harder to think of something new).
For me it’s an interesting comparison—Abasi with his 8-string fanned-fret guitar and Sandman with his 2-string slide bass. Both innovating but in different directions: complexity and simplicity. An interviewer (probably many interviewers) asked Sandman about his 2-string bass and if it was limiting. He responded by saying “every string has every note and its really not a limitation once you get used to it. I started out on one string because that was the easiest and I gradually promoted myself to two strings. Now that feels pretty complete.”
*to be continued…
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