Bass – JustFourStrings

Sometimes you feel the need for an excuse to buy something you REALLY want, but don’t really need. Sometime in the early nineties I had to have a surgical procedure and afterwards my GP told me that I was not supposed to lift anything over one and a half kilograms for several months to make sure everything would heal up properly. What a great excuse not to have to carry anything when you’re gigging, but then someone pointed out that even my bass was over the limit and I shouldn’t play at all anyway. Bummer…

After contemplating my dilemma for a while, I realised that this was my chance to purchase a bass that I had coveted for years, ever since I read about it in a German music magazine in 1987. It was called the “Ashbory” and looked like a sonic bass straight out of (the early) Dr Who… a bit like a dinosaur bone with strings. Compared to a normal bass it was tiny: slightly over half a meter long and weighing in at under a kilogram! It was fretless and equipped with special silicone strings and a piezoelectric transducer that was supposed to give it the sound of an upright bass. Unbelievable! And so finally I could justify spending a grand (in Deutschmark) for an instrument that nobody needs. The next day I was on the phone to every music shop in Cologne (the closest city with a professional music scene), trying to find out where I could get one of these Ashborys. It turned out they were as rare as hen’s teeth and nobody knew how to get their hands on one (remember: at that time the internet was only for boffins, not for buffoons). Well, I left my (landline) number with all of them and waited. Two weeks later I got a call from one of the smaller shops. They had managed to locate a second hand Ashbory in Switzerland (no further information available), and asked if I wanted it. I said yes, transfered eight hundred Deutschmark into their account, and another two weeks later I took possession of my new Ashbory. I was crestfallen: it looked like a bloody Steinberger and not at all like a dinosaur bone! It was also slightly longer, but at least it was under a kilogram, so I was officially allowed to play the thing. At that time we were rehearsing in the basement of my mums house. After the first evening with the Ashbory she complained that she had to push back all the crockery in the cupboards because of the noise: RESULT! I loved my Ashbory!!!

Nowadays it’s all much easier. You just ask Aunty Google and all the information is there at a touch of your finger. So now I know that the Ashbory bass was invented by two blokes from London, Alun Ashworth-Jones and Nigel Thornbory, and that the first series of dinosaur bone shaped Ashborys was produced by Guild in the USA. Apparently they flopped and for a few years nothing happened. Then Al and Nigel decided to give it another go and managed to make 80 Ashbory Mark II basses for the Bass Centre in London. The ugly Steinberger copy I bought from Switzerland through a small music shop in Cologne turned out to be one of these rare Mark IIs. Now I love it even more!

If you want to read more about the astonishing story of the Ashbory bass, here’s a link:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030605141040/www.ashelec.demon.co.uk/ashbory/index.htm

The other day I was trying to figure out a bass riff on a record by a rather obscure finnish band from the eighties (Bluesounds). The problem was that it was rather quick and only lasted for a few bars, and it drove me mad for a while because each time I was ready to try something new, it was already over. I figured out the first note and then …. nothing. I wasn’t quick enough. But after a few tries I remembered a tip I usually give to my students in such a situation: Begin at the end and figure it out backwards!

If you start with the last note, you are always ready for it when it comes. Once you got it, carry on with the second to last one, and so on. This way you always have time to get ready to play with the recording and check your notes/chords. Also you don’t keep repeating the stuff you already know over and over again and then fail at the first new note. If you learn in reverse order, the part you are learning gets easier the further you get through it. The hardest bit will always be the beginning of the piece and not the end. That makes it easier to relax once you played the first note and helps to store the piece in your memory.

This technique is not only great for figuring out a part by listening to a recording, it is also fantastic if you try to learn a difficult passage from scores or tabs. If you start at the beginning, you repeat the easy bit over and over again, but the hard bit (the one you WANT to practise) always throws you out and after a while turns into a real barrier in your mind: you start to fear this bloody note and therefore failure is a given (especially if you try it on stage)! But if you start at the end of the passage, you have time to prepare for the hard note and then afterwards it’s all downhill. Once you got it, the hard note joins the easy ones and the one before it becomes the new hard note. I hope that makes sense… Give it a try anyway!

Ash… what?

Learn backwards!