Bass!
About a year ago I tried to pick up playing electric guitar. I got a $100 “everything you need in a box” pack that had a so-so strat-knockoff guitar, a tiny ultra-shitty amp, and some accessories and crap with it. I was thinking I’d put in time regularly and have fun learning to play it.
Well, part of the reason I only dropped like $100 on it instead of significantly more (other than the fact that I didn’t really have significantly more at the time) was to sort of test the waters, and see if I’d commit to it enough for more investment or if I’d just tinker a little and put it down.
Turns out, that was a good move. See, being huge, I’ve got kind of big meaty fingertips, and no matter what I do, no matter how much I claw up my fingers, I still drag on strings unintentionally, which makes playing chords basically impossible… there’s always at least one, maybe two or three muted strings depending on the chord.
Naturally having a bit of a disadvantage in playing sort of put me off to it, so I never really got too into it. But a month or two ago my roommate (who’s been playing guitar just slightly longer and is a lot more serious about it) convinced me to just walk bass lines on the E and A strings while he played around in the space. And it turns out, I’m a lot better at that than at either the noodly soloing or the chord-heavy rhythm that guitar tends to lean towards.
So I did some thinking, and I started to realize … a bass guitar has more space between the strings, bigger strings (meaning less cutting into fingertips and less callus-building), sounds cool and gives music a pretty good backbone. So I took the Bush-generated stimulus check, and decided to stimulate my personal enrichment level by spending the whole thing on a bass and related equipment.
So now I’ve got an Ibanez GSR200-FM (trifade burst) bass guitar, and a Peavey MAX 112 bass amp (plus cables, a stand, a lesson book, a couple nicer cables). But then I discovered that the MAX 112 is … err … a bit too big and powerful for my room, so rather than return it I dropped the rest of the stimulus check on its little brother, a MAX 158.
So far I’ve put about as much time into playing and learning it as I did in total on the guitar over 8 months, and I’m having more fun. I’ve also got about 6 times as much invested in it… but I already think it was worth it.
So yeah …. I’m learning to play bass!
Bonus! here’s a pic of the bass, my two amps (the little peavey 158 and the hugeass peavey 112), and my roommate’s fender blues junior amp):
