Quotes About Bass

In 1972, I got my first electric bass and started playing the kind of instrument I play now. I found that the majority of musicians couldn't bear that. They are not used to listening to the bass because they think the bass is in the background to support them.

Dubstep didn't invent bass, it just zoned in on it. Bass, to varying depths, is the foundation to most dance musics.

Hip-hop was a big part of my life growing up, especially West Coast gangster rap. The reason I was able to listen to it so freely was that my mom couldn't hear any of it, so we would be driving along just blaring Too $hort's horrible misogynistic stuff, and my mom would just turn to us and say, "This is great. I can feel the bass. It sounds so nice." And we're like, "Yeah, mom. We can feel the bass, too."

I've always been playing with other people, and that's how I learned. I got a kit of drums I couldn't play, but I also knew a guitarist and a friend of mine played bass and could teach us bass, and we just played. And I learned.

I'm 13 to 17, 18 years old; I thought that's what the world was like. It never occurred to me that this was a very unusual period in music history. So I went on assuming that one day I'm going to have my band like my heroes had their own band. So people ask me this question all the time - they go, "Bass is basically a background instrument." The other thing is that in urban music, Black music, the bass has a much higher profile.

A bass player has to think and play like a bass player. A drummer has to play and think like a drummer, and stay out of the way of the vocalist. The guitar player has to respect everybody else.

So often survivors have had their experiences denied, trivialized, or distorted. Writing is an important avenue for healing because it gives you the opportunity to define your own reality. You can say: This did happen to me. It was that bad. It was the fault & responsibility of the adult. I was—and am—innocent.” The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis

Because Larry, by then, was a drummer, who would sort of get bored and tired, and rather stand up and blow kisses to people. So we needed the bass to sort of drive along.

Like, when we did Parliament and Funkadelic and Bootsy, it was actually one thing. But there were so many people that you could split them up into different groups. And then, when we went out on tour and they [the record companies] would see us all up there together - we had five, six guitars playing at one time, not including the bass! -, they said: "Wait a minute, that's just one whole group, selling different names!" But it wasn't - we had enough people in the group that each member would have a section to be another group. So now we're finally starting to get them to understand that.

I always got great respect as a bass player.

Oh Beer! Oh Hodgson, Guinness, Allsop, Bass! Names that should be on every infant's tongue! Shall days and months and years and centuries pass, And still your merits be unrecked, unsung?

In all the music that deals with experimental repetition, drum and bass, dub, various kinds of house music, there's always been a quality of atmosphere and ambience.

Because nobody wanted to play bass, I was instantly in a band.

People ask how I learned to play bass with one hand. Well, with a face like mine, you learn to do a lot of things with one hand.

It happened to be, from '73 to '78, the five years that, our most glorious years for bass players. We had Larry Graham, with his own band, Stanley Clarke with his own band. We have Bootsy doing his thing. We had Jaco Pastorius. They were all leading their own bands.

I played recorder in assembly, then I became passionate about the guitar, I don't know why. I started on electric then moved to acoustic - my brother was playing bass in the next room.

Every Bass Communion track is based on a single sound source. Increasingly I find that I'm really interested in taking a particular sound and it's almost like solving a problem. If I have a sound, the problem is how can I create a piece of music from this one sound source?

While it's a great indulgence, it's also very interesting to have three bass players on the same track.

I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you're really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument.

A couple of months ago I went fishing with a buddy of mine, we pulled his boat into the dock, I lifted up this big 'ol stringer of bass and this idiot on the dock goes, Hey, y'all catch all them fish? Nope - Talked 'em into giving up. Here's your sign.

For what I can imagine and feel and think and hear, I can hardly do anything on the acoustic bass. It used to be just pure frustration of imagining so much more and being able to get to a certain level of execution.

I think that the current climate enables a lot of musicians to do relatively well. Twenty-five years ago, you could be a bass player in a folk-rock band and do pretty well - that sort of means that you're going to have to go get a day job. But a lot of my friends have learned how to write classical music for movies and produce other people and do remixes, and DJ and go on tour, and do all these different things. The more diverse their approach, the better their chances of actually having a career.

Obviously, it's had a huge effect on repetitive music or dance music or house music. Ambient in the last ten years has infiltrated into all those repetitive musics. I don't know what part it plays in pop necessarily but I'm sure there's some connection. But in all the music that deals with experimental repetition, drum and bass, dub, various kinds of house music, there's always been a quality of atmosphere and ambience. I think it's infiltrated that pretty heavily.

I play a bunch of instruments, like piano, drums, guitar and bass. And the kazoo every now and then. I'm trying to learn how to play the trumpet and the saxophone. That's what I'm learning how to play.

I was training to be a lawyer... I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked.

I live a different way today. I have a family, and they are a priority for me. These days, I no longer wake up in the morning and worry if my bass is tuned properly and practice for hours and hours on end. I don't perform as much, but when I do, there's such magic to working in front of a live audience.

The first reason why I started to use the [electric] keyboard is because I really like the bending sound of the guitar and bass player. I can't bend the piano sound. I really like the feel behind it. I feel it adds flavour and character to my music.

I was in George Martin's studio in Amsterdam and he was telling me, 'They come in here and it takes them three days to do a bass line.' Well I'm not from that era.

Occasionally, when I run into a great bass backstage at a festival I'll play a few notes on the low E string, just to feel the instrument vibrate against my belly.

Art is my 'solo career' if you like. Musically, as a bass player, I depend on other musicians to play, whereas, with painting, I'm on my own. I find it quite easy to switch heads and I enjoy both the mayhem of being on tour and the serenity of being alone in my art studio.

Lance Bass needs to quit worrying about outer space and celebrate life by learning how to kill his own food.

I'm starting to play all the melodies with kind of keyboard sound but playing it from the bass guitar.

Bass players and drummers are brothers in the basement cooking up the groove that makes people move.

Music is real; it's something you can touch and feel. It moves you - the bass literally shakes you and rocks you from the inside. Music makes your soul feel amazing while you're performing it. It's not air, it's not wind, it's not anything like that. It's solid. It's thick. It's like summertime in New York.

I realized pretty soon that I have to do more than just play bass in the background way. So, I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted.