welp, things don't always turn out as you'd hoped. a good ol' wrench in the works is certainly a pain to deal with. regardless of how bog of a wrench it may be i find that doing my daily practice routine helps keep me maintain a sense of normalcy in my life. i just don't feel right if i haven't put my time in for the day first thing in the morning.

recently i've been taking lessons from a guy who knows his stuff, for sure. we're back to basics with walking bass lines and for the past month i've been hammering away at them daily. they're something i sort of superficially looked at a few years ago but never really got into in any sort of deep way. objectively they're quite simple to understand but they are definitely one of those things that's an inch wide and a mile deep. one could (and many have) spend a lifetime working with them and never get to the bottom.

because they are effectively an improvised line, the challenge for me has been changing my though process and focus from a scripted bass line to thinking in a more general abstractness of simply "harmony". i think it would be fair to assume most hobbyists/garage-band types that have no education on the instrument or music in general probably think in terms of absolutes. for example "the riff goes like this, 5-5-7-3" in which the riff exists in the specific frets and you conceptualize the part as the sequence of frets. i know i thought this way for a long time and i think it would be fair to assume many others do too.


breaking out of that headspace and into a focus on the harmony in general, "C-A-Dm-G, etc" can be difficult and isn't without some grinding of gears. i mean, it is a reconceptualization of something that has 20+ years of tenure in my thinkybits so it's going to take some effort to overcome. however, even spending the past month on this material almost exclusively i've noticed that change happening and it's very interesting to see. when working on some charts my conceptualization has started to shift from absolute frets to a weird nebulous blorb of chords names and shapes. in fact, i realized that i hadn't thought in terms of fret numbers in weeks, not even once. when i pick up the instrument now there is more of a sense of shape to it with a somewhat vague ascription of chords. once i start playing the focus gets much sharper.

an inch wide and a mile deep, indeed. it's exciting to begin to gain a new understanding of the bass that opens up new possibilities.

it's a neat thing and i'm all-in.