A deaf playing the bass
After a break of many, many years, I’m playing the bass again.
Similar restrictions apply to my ambitions with the bass as they apply to photography: I am hearing impaired and have a hole in the frequency range where human conversation takes place. As a two-year old, I got ill with Pneumonia and heavy fever; they gave me Penicillin, and as is known now, Penicillin can destroy your hearing. Well, better deaf than dead – I was told by my late grandmother that the Pneumonia was about to kill me and only a strong dose of this stuff had managed to save my life.
The good news is that with every session that I am playing the bass, the fingers get less rusty and I’m slowly getting a feeling for the instrument again.
The bad news is that the learning curve for the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and other software that I’m using is really steep. I have the brain of an IT guy, not the brain of a sound engineer. I guess that most of the time “I’m thinking it wrong (TM).” But, as always, if I throw in sufficient hours and energy, I’ll get there eventually.
I recently added a MIDI keyboard and a MIDI controller to the mix – and I cannot even begin to explain how great it felt to play some simple music with that keyboard using software synthesizers.
Spending time in my studio makes me happy, and investing those hours is a real pleasure, not a chore.