Eight Reasons to Play Bass

Above - My beautiful bass!

So, where did the decision to play bass come from? Allow me to give you the back story and my Eight Reasons I Wanted to Play Bass.

1. I've wanted to play an instrument for a long time. I've just longed to be able to play something so I can play along with my husband when he's playing around the house or along with my favorite song. Plus, I live in Nashville. It's a music town and it just feels right.

2. I used to think playing guitar would be so cool and that would be the way I should go. I thought I could be like Lita Ford or Nancy Wilson in Heart.

After several attempts to learn things on guitar, I've discovered a few things:

a) The little, skinny, guitar strings really hurt when you have to press on them. They dig right into the flesh of your fingers and until you build up some decent callouses on your fingers - ouch.

b) My nails really get in the way of me making the contact I need to make with the strings and I don't really want to give up my nails.

3. My husband is a great guitar player. He's been playing since age 6. He's really already got the whole "guitar playing thing" covered. I would just be another (not as good) guitar player in the house. However, with the bass, I feel like it's a whole new ball game. While he can also play bass (and he may always be a better bass player than me too), his primary instrument is guitar, so why not turn to something that I can play along with him. If there's a cool song I want to learn on the radio, let him handle the cool guitar parts and I can learn to sort of groove along with him in my own way.

4. The strings on the bass are much fatter than guitar strings and don't hurt my fingers nearly as much as guitar strings, (but still hurt a little).

5. I can play bass AND keep my nails! Somehow, it still works!

6. Guitar = 6 strings, Bass = 4 strings. Two less strings to be concerned with? Yeah, sounds good to me.

7. As I am learning the preliminaries of beginner bass playing, it seems like there is much more focus on "notes" than on "chords"--at least right now. It seems I can get away with learning about one note at a time instead of dealing with entire chords to learn a song.

8. Last, but not least, we got a great deal on a cheap bass AND scored some free shipping as well. How can you go wrong with that?!

So, there you go. Now you know my reasons for wanting to learn bass. It's been wonderful so far. It's fun when something finally "clicks". It's fun to get more comfortable with playing. The whole experience is kind of exhilarating.

The best part?

After 4 days of just playing scales over and over and over, my husband, (who knows I'm a huge Nickelback fan) charted out the notes for the song, "Rockstar" for me.

I can play bass on a Nickelback song. (While looking at notes and while looking at where my fingers need to go.)

But I can play bass on a Nickelback song!

I never thought I could do something that cool (in my eyes) in less than a week. It's cool to have an awesome teacher (my sweet husband) who knows how to keep me motivated and to keep me wanting to learn more.

Who knows what could be next? A Beatles tune? Def Leppard? AC/DC? Journey?

I can hardly wait to find out...