by vaughn skow January 30, 2021 4 min read
Howdy guitar gang! It's January of 2021 as I pen this blog, I thank God for my gig playing bass at a local church. Shoot, as musicians, ANY gig we get we should be grateful for. Most clubs are gone, most concerts are gone, well, most live music is gone, so folks take what ya can get! Shoot, do WHATEVER you can to keep your chops up and keep playing music with other real, flesh-n-blood musicians. Sorry for my side-trip there, let's get to today's topic: why a guitar player NEEDS to spend some serious time playing ... bass!
So, I've been playing guitar since age 13, and I think I acquired my first bass (a Fender Mustang Bass) at about 16, so playing a LITTLE bass on my own demos and stuff like that is no new thing. However, getting serious about it IS. I'm about two years into being the regular bass player at a cool contemporary church in the greater Nashville, TN area. I took the gig because it was "my" church and they needed a bass player. What have I learned two years and hundreds of performances later? Bass is a BIG DEAL, it's soooooo much more than just providing a solid bottom end and grooving with the drummer. SO MUCH MORE! Don't believe me? Consider this: Edward VanHalen not only played guitar (fairly well, most would agree), but he ALSO played bass on many of VanHalen's recordings, On the VH3 album, Eddie played bass on all of the album except for 2 songs.
See ya next week when I talk about how my time behind a DRUMSET has made a better guitar player out of me. See ya then, it'll be soooo awesome!
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