Categories: uncategorized
Date: 16 August 2008 14:32:36
I went to a gig.
Nothing so unusual about that, as I went to quite a few, even if not as many as I'd wanted or should have gone to. It was somewhat unusual being someone whose music I'd never heard; I'd only heard of him. Still, I was fairly adventurous back then and thought it worth a try. In some ways it makes the gig harder when none of the songs are familiar, but in others it makes it easier because you react purely to the music, and don't have the kneejerk positive reaction to the songs you know and negative reaction to the songs you don't know that you get with someone you're familiar with.
And perhaps that's why I find now that that was probably the gig that's influenced me more than any other. I suppose I was listening to the sound as much as the songs, and I can't now list definitively any of the songs that were performed, but I can remember clearly some percussion instruments and sounds that I'd never encountered before, and some guitar sounds that were completely baffling even though I'd been playing for a good few years by then. But most importantly the bassist was playing a fretless. I think that was the first gig I'd been to with a fretless bassist, and the sound and fluidity just grabbed me. It wasn't a lightbulb moment, but I can look back now and identify it firmly as the key to why I stopped viewing guitar as my main instrument, and why I came to see fretless as really the only way of playing bass.
What's funny is that it's taken some digging in my mind to establish this as the cause. If you'd asked I could easily have told you that bass was my instrument and that fretless was best, but it's a bit like when you're driving and you suddenly find you're on the A96 without ever having consciously turned on to it or noticed a junction. You find you're there, and you don't question. I find it really interesting how we can make big changes without even noticing the stimulus or that the change is taking place.