Bass(ic) instinct and the Internet

Music is not mathematics; it’s all about expression, baby. Some would claim that all it takes is “a red guitar, three chords and the Truth” to change the world (artists from the sagely Bob Dylan to the iconoclastic Sex Pistols to the doomed yet brilliant Kurt Cobain serve as cases in point), and that you don’t need to be a Mozart, approximately, to play, say, punk or twelve-bar blues. Yes, you don’t have to be a mathematician with the mind of a Stephen Hawking or an Italo Calvino to master eighth or sixteenth notes, 3/4 and 4/4 time signatures, ritards, staccatos or glissandos with the ultimate goal of playing Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water and other dinosaur rock classics. But a little knowledge of musical notation or the easier-to-read tablature never hurts anyone. Here’s where the Internet comes in.

Before, young turks playing in garage rock bands at places like Club Dredd learned songs solely by ear or through photocopies of Guitar for the Practicing Musician sold by enterprising musicians with Xerox machines. Back then, it was quite a stretch to figure out Dave Navarro’s atmospheric guitar parts or Kim Thayil’s solo in Spoonman or Black Hole Sun. These days, all it takes is for kids to go online, log on to any of the tablature sites on the Web and do a quick search for a particular song.

Guitar players never had it so good: they have access to musical pieces recorded by guitar gods like Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and The Edge of U2. Thank the Net fairies (kids with cornrows living in college dorms in Idaho, Missouri, etc.) who wear out their patience and tape decks by transcribing songs and posting them in various websites such as the On-Line Guitar Archive or OLGA, harmony-central.com/Guitar/OLGA, tab.nutz.org, tabfind.com, etc.

On the other hand, those who play bass can count on a site like basstabarchive.com for tabs, lessons, discussions as well as online shopping.

Because of the Bass Tab Archive, the largest searchable collection of bass tablatures on the Internet, bass players need not relegate themselves to the repetitive plunking of the root chord, ad infinitum a la U2. They have access to hundreds of tabs featuring virtuosos who have turned the bass into a melodic (and not just a rhythmic/timekeeping) instrument: Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, Les Claypool of Primus, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others. All surfers have to do is enter the song or the name of the artist in the search box.

What’s great is that the BTA, which is updated daily and is relatively unadorned for faster loading, features hundreds of songs covering a wide range of styles and genres: from jazz to rock, from pop to reggae. From the simple (punkish material by Green Day, Blink-182, Offspring) to the complicated (aural masterpieces by Weather Report, Steely Dan, Dream Theater), the site offers everything that is a “testament to the wonderful things that can be accomplished in bass playing.”

Visitors to the Bass Tab Archive can make a request for a particular tune that is giving them trouble in the woodshedding department. (Jaco’s Continuum or Portrait of Tracy and Victor Wooten’s version of Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed come to mind.) And if a brash young bassist thinks he has a song all figured out, he can use Windows Notepad to write the tab and upload it to the site to be of service to his bass-playing brethren.

Lessons also abound in the site. Aspiring bassists can check out lessons on bass line construction, triads, scalar playing, single string ideas, as well as slapping and tapping techniques. A comprehensive selection of instruction books and videos are available in the BTA bookstore as well.

These days, because of sites like basstabarchive.com, the bass is literally in your interface.