Day 65: Bass Groove

Hi again everyone!

Today, I'll be talking about a concept found in the Rockband games- the bass groove- and how it applies to real life.

Firstly, a quick thing about Rockband: I always played either bass or guitar, depending on the song. There are four levels of difficulty- easy, medium, hard and expert- and I always saw bass as essentially guitar, but a half-step of difficulty lower. For the average song, expert bass is right in between hard and expert guitar, so it's a good way to improve without being too challenged, or too relaxed. I eventually reached a point where I could do almost every song on expert bass, whereas with guitar I could only manage around half, so I would usually pick bass for playlists so that I could safely play on expert.

One feature of Rockband is the Bass Groove. Essentially, on most instruments, you could get up to 4x score multipliers, but on bass you could go up to 6x. At this point, the screen would get a fancy overlay, and the words "Bass Groove" would appear on the top of the screen. Now, at the time, I thought this was something of a myth- the idea that bassists would somehow get into this other state of mind where they do nothing but play bass. It helps that, at the time, the only playing I really did was in a concert band class, where you had to be reading music and playing along carefully with a large group of musicians- it took focus, and it didn't really allow you to zoom out.

I don't know when exactly it started, but I began to realise there was a such thing. One specific thing I remember was watching a video- it was a live video of The Who, but with the bass track isolated and the camera focused solely on the bassist. You can find the video on YouTube- just search "The Who isolated bass"- if you do watch it, notice how engrossed he is in playing. This video was one of the first times I realised that there may actually be some truth to this idea.

Today was another one of those events (though, to be fair, there have been others, most of which were during the rock and roll club). I was jamming with a few members of the club, and I had an epiphany. My mind was completely filled with this one riff I was playing, but not in such a straightforward way as I expected. One part of my mind was just repeating the riff; another was keeping track of the other instruments, and what they were doing; another was constantly searching for fills I could do, and what they would sound like; and another was coming up with ways to modify the riff. That was it though- there was no part of my conscious mind telling my fingers to move (at least, until one of my fingers became sore and I had to figure out how to substitute it out). In fact, there were times where I missed a note in my mind, but somehow subconsciously hit it. The best comparison I could draw to this is a sort of real-time autocorrect- if you can imagine typing a phrase and hitting the wrong key, but having the right letter appear on the screen. It felt like I physically couldn't mess up (though I obviously still could (and probably did a few times)).

There is one problem with this state of mind though- it's not particularly easy to get to. If you're at all tired (which I often tend to be on Tuesday nights), it can be hard to really get into the song and focus- in those cases, I usually spend more time either playing songs I already know or just listening. The thing is, though, I'm not sure it works if you're fully awake either. It seems to be a balance between focus and slightly zoning out.

Anyways, hopefully you enjoyed today's post! If you've ever had an experience like this, whether it was playing music or doing something else, let me know about it!