lowquality.net

Wednes­day night I played a show at Scotty Quixx with my new friends Geoff and Rianna. We had a pretty awe­some time and I ran into a few famil­iar faces. We didn’t have a drum­mer, we rehearsed for only a cou­ple of nights before the show and we still sounded pretty solid in my opin­ion (I did get lost in the bridge of “Since I’ve Been Lov­ing You” but these things happen).

Play­ing a gig with­out a drum­mer is some­thing you see upright bassists do much more often for some rea­son and almost never seems to hap­pen with the bass gui­tar. I know that I’ve done it before with peo­ple but this was the first time I’d taken the role so seri­ously. Geoff and I were strug­gling at rehearsals to decide what the best way to approach play­ing drum­mer­less would be. Should we be play­ing more to fill the absence of drums? Or, should we be play­ing less to mimic the sup­port­ing role of the drums? At dif­fer­ent times it seemed like either solu­tion could be the right one, but nei­ther seemed to always be the answer…

…Until we got on stage. Then every­thing seemed to just lock in place. It was prob­a­bly one of the bet­ter shows I’ve played in a long time and it was 5 songs and we were pretty poorly rehearsed. It’s nice to feel like you are coast­ing by on sheer skill (no, really, I mean that).

As a bass player, you’ve got to put a feather in your cap when you play a gig with­out a drum­mer and you can still see peo­ple in the audi­ence mov­ing to the music (even if its just a sway or a lit­tle head bob). It’s a feel­ing of accom­plish­ment I didn’t expect.