The Guitar Goes Plural

I was definitely not going to buy a new guitar. Even though for the past couple days I’ve been roaming the internet, looking at prices and models of electric basses, it wasn’t because I was planning to buy one. When my birthday comes around in a few months, then, sure, a nice cheap starter bass would be a wonderful present for myself. But not now. Nope, definitely not now.

Oh why do we persist in lying to ourselves so?

I had just been to the post office, mailing off the last of the tax forms. (One drawback to being self-employed: paying estimated taxes every quarter. Blah.) After months of work, the whole tax thing was finally completely done. And as it happens, the nearest post office branch is quite close to the venerable West L.A. Music.

“Well,” said I to my lying self, feeling good about the end of the whole tax thing, “when I do get a bass, I’ll definitely need a metronome with which to practice. It is a rhythm instrument, after all. Maybe I should just go get a metronome now, so that I’ll have it when the time comes.” While trying to decide this I was walking home, in the opposite direction from the music store, so that I ended up making a long tortured loop to get back to the store. Where I was definitely going to only buy a metronome. And maybe a pickup for the acoustic guitar, but that was it, for sure.

And the guy behind the counter--who happened to be their bass guitar expert--had to enter some stuff in his computer, during which I just kinda looked around, around, drums, keyboards, guitars, basses, and . . . “Hey, I’m not gonna buy today, but do you think I could maybe try out a couple of your basses?” Just so I could get a feel for a model I might like. You know. When the time comes.

Now, I’ve never played so much as a single note on a bass. But it is, really, the instrument I’ve always been drawn to. When I listen to music, it’s the bass line that my ear always follows, the bass line I always find myself humming. It’s probably true that I only bought the acoustic in order to learn the rudiments of stringed instruments before getting a bass. And being such a rank beginner, I wasn’t even considering a fretless bass because, really, you need to be an expert to play one of those. But the guy at the store, he asked what kind of bass work I was likely to want to play, and, thinking of the ne plus ultra bass work in “Come Together,” I said that I probably wanted something with a really fluid sound.

He immediately picked up a fretless bass. But it turns out that Squier (the cheap division of Fender) makes a fretless bass where, and this is just brilliant, the fret lines are painted on the neck. All the sound of a fretless bass, but there are still guides for beginners like me to follow. Dead simple—and as soon as I hit a couple notes and ran my fingers up and down the neck, well hell, I was completely hooked.

But still, I said “This is great, I’m definitely gonna want one of these in a couple months.” The clever guy, he said maybe he could drop the price a little, and went off to check. At exactly this moment, my phone happened to ring with some very good news about a meeting Marc Rosenbush had just had that went really quite remarkably well. Suddenly I was feeling, oh that most horrible of things, optimistic.

Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a bass. And an amp too, of course. And a strap. Plus that bloody metronome.

The acoustic is a complex instrument--six strings, and lots of chord-playing in infinite variations. A bass has only four strings, and you can get away with a lot by just playing one string at a time. It just sorta works for me, it makes an immediate kind of sense, in a way that the guitar still doesn’t. After only one day of practice--mostly spent endlessly repeating the various notes along the E string, trying to drill them into my brain, and keeping time with the metronome--I still don’t know much at all. But I’m having a hell of a time.

(And now I have to go down to San Diego for the weekend, and leave the bass behind. Which suddenly seems like a very great sacrifice indeed.)

Not buying a bass. Yeah, right. Tell me another one.