i was not!
It’s been 20 years since I heard that album but it’s pretty complex.
Not quite sure why you’re comparing Pixies basslines with Television guitar? How about pixies basslines with Nirvana chords?
I’m just saying that people who haven’t played instruments and don’t have any expectation of it will see them as inherently complex. They’d strum across a guitar, hear the dissonance and just assume it’s beyond them. Whereas if you’ve learned how a bass works you probably instinctively understand a guitar isn’t much more complex to produce nice sounds out of?
And additionally, you would get that a lot of what makes you get good with an instrument is simply boring slog.
I’m comparing the two as they were two albums I loved when I started playing music.
When I picked up a bass I had barely played an instrument. Had piano lessons for a year or two but they were so bad at teaching that I never learned anything from them so I had no idea how the fundamentals were.
I never realised that your could transfer the skills you learned on one instrument over to another, I thought that the guitar was a nebulous instrument that I’d never be able to grasp. I didn’t pick one up until I was twenty and even then didn’t have an understanding as to how to play it until years later.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that in my case I didn’t realise you could just apply the skills used in learning one instrument to another. I know that now but fifteen year old Kallgeese didn’t and was put off learning guitar by its seeming complexity.
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Played a guitar upside down the first month or so I had one. Good times.
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I play bass. Self-taught guitar, but my fingers are too stubby and it was becoming really frustrating, so I moved to bass, which I feel befits my personality better anyway.
I started playing piano/recorder/clarinet when I was 6 or 7. Got into Nirvana and Sonic Youth when I was about 11 and taught myself how to play the guitar, and gave up playing the other instruments.
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that’s horrendous!
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Absolutely
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I play bass but I’ll admit I’m pretty rubbish/ill suited to it, mainly fuck around with peter hooky widdly melodies than concentrating on playing to the kick
As I’ve said before though overdrive and delay solves all
yeah, exactly.
Plus, no one ‘really’ notices if you’re a bit of shit a bassist.
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I reckon other bassists notice, but who the fuck cares about those nonces.
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I had violin lessons when I was younger, then self-taught bass when my pals wanted to start a band. Ended up with a thoroughly ill-deserved reputation for being good at it because everyone else plodded along on the root notes and I could play some Nirvana or Rancid stuff. Talk about low standards, Christ.
I get a lot of joy out of it nowadays but still am not particularly technically proficient. Almost none of the violin stuff has transferred over, which is a huge shame. I can read musical notation, can sight read/sing, but there’s no link between that and how I play bass, because that was learned by ear and by tabs.
I really want to do something about this and have looked into lessons to join the dots and fix my terrible technique, but i) I’m the world’s laziest man, and ii) I worry that it’ll take some of the fun out of it.
After finishing Day of the Baphomets, my next project is going to be all of Maxwell Murder, just so if time travel is invented in my lifetime I can go back to 16 year old me and go “Watch THIS, you fucking prick!”
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