True, but if you sold all your pedals, I bet you could afford a couple now.
HMMM...
bigchiefbc wrote:In the last few years, I've started getting more and more into synth because there's so many more tones that I can't get on a bass or guitar, no matter what effects I use.
Attention ILF heed this mans words... Quit trying to Synth Up Yo Guitbass and just buy a Synth... Nobody does that with Saxomaphones or Flutes or their Glockenspiels...
I'm sure Mogwai has tried runing their glockenspiel through a fuckload of effects. I'd be shocked if they hadn't
sonidero wrote:... Nobody does that with Saxomaphones or Flutes or their Glockenspiels...
Well, maybe they should!
Yeah I was thinking the other day about how many people play other instruments but try hard as hell to get it to sound like another instrument... How can I cope those Rhodes tones with my Tuba, what pedal will make my Gamelan sound more Oboey, why doesn't my Hurdy Gurdy sound like Bei Bei's Guzheng???
Last edited by sonidero on Sat Jan 19, 2013 1:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
I play guitar because krunchkracklezipsizzle. I play bass because it sounds like the language of trees. I play drums because they sound like storms. Mandolins and banjos because I'm, well, southern. Lap steel because through fuzz, it sounds like that part of Sin City where the one gal screams "HEEEEEEE MAAAAADE MEEEEE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTCCHHHHH!!!!"
i play several instruments to some degree of ability or another. what i wound up was a total accident. here's how it went: when i was little i really, really really wanted to play the drums. i was hella hyperactive and it would have been perfect for me, but when the band guy came around to my elementary school there were 700 kids in front of me and 600 wanted to play drums, so i settled for trumpet which was about the worst possible instrument for me due to my reduced lung capacity. saxophone would have been a better choice, but it was the era of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. once individual instruments and non-repetitive parts became more common in rock (i.e. post 1965) i wanted to play bass (i was totally inspired by Jack Casady's playing on the jam at the end of the Jefferson Airlpane's "Somebody To Love"), but my parents were poor and the cheapest bass + amplifier deal you could get from the Montgomery Wards or Sears catalog was $99, and they couldn't swing that...my father was working two jobs during that part of my childhood. eventually my older brother got a $25 nylon-stringed acoustic from Woolworths, and since he was out a lot i started nicking the guitar when he was gone and took to it like the proverbial duck to water. by the time i'd been playing for a couple of weeks i could recognize chords by the order and timbre of the notes even if they were capoed up, and could figure out fairly simple stuff like Creedence and the Lovin' Spoonful by ear.
i eventually learned to play bass when i took a Jazz Improvisation lab class at City College of San Francisco in the mid-1980s and there were seven guitar players (three of whom dropped after the first class) and no bassist; the instructor implored one of us to play the bass--a very nice fretless Jazz Bass through a big-ass 70s-era Bassman stack--and i realized that this was my opportunity to learn to play bass in an ensemble and volunteered. i went and stood as close to the drummer as i could, with my foot on the edge of the kick drum if i could, and by the end of the semester i could walk in the key of F like a motherfucker.
i picked up other instruments along the way...the extent to which i can play the drums is due to a dear friend i had in the 70s who used to let me come over to his house and play his roundbadge Gretsch kit along to Time Fades Away, Red Octopus, and the first Souther/Hillman/Furay Band album. as you'd gather, i'm totally influenced by Johnny Barbata and Jim Gordon as well as Bill Kreutzmann of the Dead, rendered in a rickety style that sounds kind of like Dannie Richmond on his deathbed. i learned piano by playing Neil Young songs and can fake my way through Hammond-style organ parts pretty well, and used to have a nice wheezy country blues harmonica style back when harmonicas didn't cost TWENTY-SEVEN DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS EACH. and i can pick up pretty much any fretted stringed instrument if given sufficient time to twig the tuning though the Turkish saz totally flummoxed me.
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
FIFTY YEARS OF SCARING THE CHILDREN 1970-2020--and i'm not done yet
I picked up piano when I was 8 because my mum and sister played guitar and I sure as hell wasn't going to pick the same instrument as them.. Then I quit after 4-5 years and picked up guitar because all the music I was listening to at the time was guitar based alternative rock sorta stuff. For a while now I've been eager to work towards becoming a percussionist (glockenspiel, vibraphone, drums etc), Especially after seeing Tortoise live, crazy multi-instrumentalist guys they are. I can't help but feel like it's too late though, like I should just stick to what I'm currently good at if I want any chance of making a career out of music.
my elder sister had tried playing guitar briefly so there was a classical guitar lying abandoned in the house. i started playing around with it, probably looked for some info on tuning and chords etc in the library or wherever the info was kept in those days. it's a nice instrument to start on, its not too hard to hold down the strings, its not too loud and horrible sounding, nice resonant sounds. there was an old piano in the house too, i used to like playing the really deep notes but never got into it.
all this would have happened in parallel to my growing interest in music, mostly rock based guitar music at the time, i dont know if i felt a connection between the bands i was hearing and me playing a bit of guitar by myself.
it just snowballed from there until i became the Guitar God i am today ...
since then i really enjoy playing keyboards for composing, the notes are all laid out and easy to access, and i like to keep it naive and a bit of a mystery.
Sold to: dan_abnormal (3 times), Abanoise, Kayzer, Ragged Trousers, Schlatte
Bought from: McSpunckle, RitalinCupcake, Tendollarcat, Brobee, Ryan, cedarskies, behndy
I tried several instruments in elementary school - drums, trombone, piano. What I didn't know was that my band teacher told my parents that I was a lost cause, and would never be able to play an instrument. They told him to go pound sand (albeit in more polite terms), and didn't tell me about the incident until I was in my 20's.
In middle school, I got into all the usual guitar dudes - Hendrix, Page, etc. Told my parents that I wanted to play guitar, so they bought me an acoustic. I started taking lessons from a local choir teacher who also knew a little guitar. Once I mastered "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" on the high E string, she told my folks that she wouldn't be able to teach me much more. Around that time, a blues guitar teacher moved to town, and I signed up with him, learning Delta blues guitar... which mostly meant sitting around listening to him talk about the 60's and occasionally "jamming out." I never learned chords, and pretty much stuck to weird melodic lines over whatever my teacher would play. My first live performance was a terrible rendition of "Stagger Lee" at a school assembly. It was most notable in that I learned the audience has no idea what's going wrong on stage if you don't let on.
Later, in high school, some of my burner friends found out that I played without a pick, they told me that I should switch to bass and join their band (since "the best" metal bassists didn't use picks). I joined "State of Euphoria" (named after the Anthrax album, natch) long enough to realize that I was too much of a school nerd to slack enough to practice with them. I quit, and spent the next couple of years practicing bass on my own, trying to imitate some hypothetical amalgam of Newstead, Burton, Claypool, Flea and Laswell. The summer after graduation, my friends approached me again, and I stuck with the band through the summer - we played a bunch of bar gigs, venturing as far out as two hours deep into Canada (without work papers, we had to trick our way across the border in a couple of different vehicles). By the time I left for college, I was pretty well hooked on playing live, and bass in particular.
bigchiefbc wrote:In the last few years, I've started getting more and more into synth because there's so many more tones that I can't get on a bass or guitar, no matter what effects I use.
