Do you ever feel....

[...]

Sometimes you just need some tough love. Rub some dirt on it and move on. Really. If you think you suck, than you suck.

[Kramer Ferrington III.]

Then I'll listen to the likes of Jonas Reingold or Tal Wilkenfeld and many others of their caliber and realize even more how much I suck. Still doesn't stop me from playing and loving it.

 

Yeah, that's something that happens to me. Even when people tell me I'm good, well... if *I'm* good, where does that leave ? They must be on a completely different scale. If I'm a six out of ten,. those guys must be into minus figures

 

It's a really big world out there, and there's so many, many people that are WAY better than I'll ever be (and often, nobody's heard of them).

 

The point however, is that it's not that's about to play a song with my band, it's ME. So I just forget about and just do the best I can.

[DavidMPires]

If you are in a band, and people appreciate you, then you can't be that bad. If the world was full of Victor Wootens, Marcus Millers etc... it would pretty dam boring.

 

Steve said something to me once, I told him I was bored to play the same songs over and over again and that I didn't really like some songs in my covers band. he repplied.

 

"If you are playing any song, make sure you play it like you mean it, so it sounds like if the best player in the world is playing it. You need to be at your best everytime you are playing, and that I tell you is a pretty hard thing to do."

[Phil W]

Yes, you need to be the best at playing that song right then and there.

 

We could all give up, at least most of us here when we hear Linley Marthe, Jonas Hellborg or Reingold, Tal, Steve Bailey, Victor Wooten or Bailey, AJ or whoever but we are all individuals. We all have something to offer - even if we're not as 'good' as the other guy.

 

I mean you could give up on life because you're not as good at X at any number of skills. That's not the nature of humanity. We all have talents, we all have our own thing and our own perspective. Sometimes we lose track of that.

 

Sometimes we have to take some quiet time to realise who we are; and that we are unique and not just the sum of out listening, our influences and our experiences.

 

It depends on your world-view buy I pray at times when I need inspiration and I sometimes get it. Other people might meditate, spend some time with nature or just put down the bass for a while and do something else. I always love the bass twice as much when I've been away from it for a week or two.

 

When it comes to practice, it all depends what and how you practise as to how rapidly it makes an impact on the quality of your playing.

[yourlord]

I'm not Geddy, Wooten, or Marcus Miller.. I'll never be as good as they are at bass.. Playing an instrument is 60% working at it and 40% natural talent. I have some natural talent, but not anywhere near the level of many of those mentioned in this thread so far. My natural gifts tend toward computers and engineering more than anything else. Anyone can learn to play an instrument reasonably well, but will always be limited by what they lack in that 40% natural talent field. Others can pick up an instrument and they have that 40% talent already filled and can almost match someone with no natural gifts but whom worked really hard at it.

 

I came to this realization early in my bass playing life. I had been playing bass for about 2 years, and I was reasonably good for that level. I was playing Cliff Burton Metallica, Megadeth and some of the easier Iron Maiden songs as well already.. I worked with a guy at the time who had never touched a guitar until about 8 months before this incident. He brought his guitar to work one day when I happened to have my bass there. He proceeded to play John Petrucci solos like they were just a warm up, and honestly made Steve Vai and pretty much any other virtuoso look like a hack..

 

He asked to see my bass because he had never played one. He took it, and played it better with his fingers, a lot better, than I could at the time (I would smoke him now, but that's 16 years of playing under my belt against his never having touched a bass. I know given a year to play one he would eat me for lunch even now)..

 

That's when I realized how much being "wired" for something mattered in your ability to truly master it. I have the wiring to be somewhat better than average at bass, but I'm not wired to be an absolute master. It's something I work for, but deep down I know I'll never attain.. I don't feel bad about it though. I use it as motivation to push myself to practice and play harder. I may never be able to pull off some funked-up Geddy as effortlessly as he does, but I'll pull it off if it kills me.. If it was easy, it would bore me..

 

There will always be someone better than you at something. That's no excuse for not trying.

 

 

[sweet dissonance]

Take more meds.

 

Go play music with people worse than you are.

 

Get asked back to play with people who are better than you are.

 

oh dear. lol

[sweet dissonance]

thanks for all the advice, it really helps! XD

[BIGchief]

i think the best thing to do is to not play for a few days. I find that after not thinking about bass for a while, the next time I pick it up it's as if I have a new view for it. Therefore music block is gone.

[...]

Playing an instrument is 60% working at it and 40% natural talent.

 

Couldn't disagree more.

 

Playing an instrument is muscle memory and training your body to do something. Anyone who practiced enough (properly) could get serious chops together. Making music is a completely different story.

[yourlord]

Have you seriously never met someone that guitar or bass was just natural for them? You've never met a person who, no matter how hard they practice, they never get very good at it? I've met people that put in 3 times or more the amount of time and effort into practicing that can't hold a candle to me.. Likewise I've met people who can slack and just casually play here and there that can give me a run for my money or even smoke me..

 

[Phil W]

Yes, but there is a serious difference between playing music and making music. Some people develop the chops to play really well. Some people develop their talent for music making. Some do both, some neither.

[Tom Capasso]

I'm a natural on sax - that's what my grade school music teacher told my mom. She said it like this - "He's a natural but he doesn't practice, so he's not doing as well as he could."

 

I like to think I'm a natural musician - I feel that I am, but there's no question that talent and natural ability only gets me so far.

 

We had a gig Saturday. I enjoyed it, and played pretty well. I did muck up somewhere in Hotel California - one guitar player said "we need to work on the vocals" (oops) and the other said he heard bad notes on bass (double oops), so I'm feeling a bit down about that. I know what I'll do though - I'll practice the hell out of that song on bass so that I can do anything at the same time and not screw up the bass. As to the vocals, I'm more limited, and we'll probably have to think about the vocal arrangement a bit and work out something different at the next rehearsal.

 

Thing is: just because I feel down about it doesn't mean I'm going to stay that way. It's not my style to stay down.

 

Tom

[The Bear Jew]

We all have sucky days. It's part of life.

Acknowledge and move on. Or, yeah, see your doctor about getting stronger meds.

 

Personally, I don't sweat this kind of stuff. If I'm having an off day, I chalk it up to experience and do my best to minimize my crap playing by either taking safe route or getting so "out there" that folks think I am insane, gifted and doing stuff they can't even understand. The first one is true most of the time, but the latter two are purely in the ears of the listener.

 

And I never get into that whole, "Ohhhh... that guy's better than me... wow, I suck!" mentality. One thing is certain--I never compare myself with other players. I'm not them, and they're not me. Why compare?

 

To be perfectly honest, I'm not concerned about being some be-all, end-all, awesome guitar or bass player. I'm happy with the way I play, and, even though I practice, I'm not trying to blow anyone's mind with my mad skillz. I'd much rather create memorable music well within my abilities and play it as hard and passionately as possible. I play technically well enough to do whatever I hear in my head, and that's most important to me. The playing part is just a matter of accumluated experience--the really challenging part at this point is more theoretical. "What goes better here--this part or this part?" "How do I get out of this riff and into that one without sounding noodley or cliched?" "Am I repeating myself too often in this solo?"

 

 

 

[slowfinger]

....Like you suck at bass/music in general?

If so, how do you get rid of this feeling? More practice?

Yes.

I don't - I just accept the fact. I have plenty of evidence (videos, recordings of gigs) that demonstrate the fact (that I suck etc). I'm about to post an example ('Roll Over etc ...' from the unreleased video - 'The What - Live on the Back of a Truck') on our myspace page.

 

But I don't care - I kind of like playing the way I play.