To view the video (40 minutes) of the interview with Steve Kilbey of The Church, please view it in the Subscribers Section.

Keep looking in simplicity …. I think the secret … for a bass-playing singer songwriter, is that the song is the most important thing, then the singing, and then the bass playing, and yet paradoxically, the bass playing is the foundation that holds the whole thing up. It’s a good position to be in, a singing-bassist, because you are at the very top end and you’re right at the bottom as well. So it’s as if you’re working on the roof and you’re working on the drains, and everything in between. So I think being a singing songwriting bass player is definitely a good place to get in the band, especially if you have some ideas that you kind of want to impose on some other players, I definitely think being a singing songwriter bass player is a good place to come from and quite a position of power.
-Steve Kilbey

I recently had the chance to interview Steve Kilbey, the bassist and vocalist of the Australian Rock Band The Church. Fourty-Four of his Answers about Singing, Playing Bass, band-formation, band-evolution, and a little about songwriting, all of which are included in the video. Here are some highlights:

Song-Construction

Steve Kilbey gives the impression in this interview that he does not get caught up in the geeky trappings of large home-recording setups – he prefers Garage Band – or of large equipment – he performs without an amplifier. Instead, he focuses his energy on song-writing, or “song-construction” as he calls it. He likens his song-creation process, and his process of learning to perform his songs as a singing-bassist, to the use of aggregate creative tools such as iMovie or Garage Band, and characterizes his song-creation process as a jam, either with music from The Church or with music from himself.

Performance Schizophrenia

Steve’s description of performing as a singing-bassist is one of an uneasy co-existence between the inner bass-guitarist with the inner vocalist. The inner bassist and the inner-vocalist must be constantly restrained from communicating or meddling with one-another, because they will otherwise “ruin everything”. For Steve, learning to perform certain songs is akin to learning a new language, and it requires abandoning natural instinct and forging new neural pathways.

Marking the neck of the bass for vision-free fretboard-sliding

Reacting to a suggestion made in one of the interview questions, Steve ponders notching his bass-neck at the octave-mark to coordinate his sliding. To be followed up!

Check out the Video!

Steve was kind enough to share about an hour of his time and about an acre of his patience, as our conversation narrowly avoided being thwarted by connection-difficulties on several occasions. The fascinating conversation covered topics from bass-guitar types to Yoga as fitness training for musicians. If you are a Singer-Songwriter considering picking up the bass as your instrument of mass-creation, or are a big fan of The Church, then you are advised to subscribe to singingbassist.com, and proceed to the subscribers-section to watch the full interview with Steve Kilbey.

Here are some concert videos of the church from this year and from twenty years ago:

The second conversation between Spacehog’s Royston Langdon and The Singing Bassist was a better match in terms of Skype Connectivity and accommodating Time-Zone Difference.

This interview was recorded on June 25, 2009.

Singing Bassist: Tell us about your recording setup at home.
Royston Langdon: I use Logic. I just use my laptop,. I have a mic-pre and a compressor. I don’t do anything seriously at home, but sometimes things come out pretty well and I end up using bits and bobs end up on the final recording. This time Richard has come in with quite a few things, little demos, and bits and bobs which we might use.

SB: Do you ever play on a fretless bass?
RL: I don’t have a fretless bass, I remember going into the music stores, and trying them out, I never really got my head around them, as a kid, they always seemed interesting, in some ways because you can slide around, but no, I don’t think so, it’s kind of weird, never came across the need to do it. I played the double bass recently, also fretless, which was enjoyable. My brother Antony took up the double-bass for a while, while we were at school, so I remember having one for a while, its obviously a very impractical instrument, being very large, can’t even fit it into a taxi in NY.

SB: When did you first start playing bass in a band setting?
RL: In NY when we used to live on 2nd avenue in my friend’s place. I seem to remember playing one at his house. We had some of our first rehearsals in the apartment, that my brother and myself and Bob, who was the original guitar player, used to live in, and Johnny would come over, then it became a bit difficult because it was a bit loud. so we had to knock that on the head. That was first time I remember picking up the bass, in that room, and it was literally like everything else with Ant and I, I think i tried to get him to do it for a while and he wasn’t backing down he wanted to play the guitar, and that was that. It made sense that I did it.

SB: Was it always clear that you would be singing, at first rehearsals?
RL: I don’t sing all the songs in Spacehog, my brother sings some too. But yeah, I didn’t really have a problem with that. It was something I had to practice. It took a while to get my head around, but it became quite fun, trying to figure it out.

SB: What techniques would you use for practicing that? Did you intensely use a metronome?
RL: I didn’t really, we used to practice together, I’ve never really practiced my own on my bass, I like to feel it a bit more than that. And also the drums, the drummer, the way he was playing, back then, when I first started, was really important to how I ended up playing the bass guitar.

SB: In which way?
RL: I think before I met johnny and started to play with Johnny, I hadn’t really played with anybody who was any good really, to that extent, I found it quite inspiring to have that, and obviously the bass and the drums go together, usually, often, in the standard format of playing a rock and roll song anyway they do, so that was kind of crucial for me.

SB: I’ve always wondered about the alone part of practicing bass and singing, because if you want to start a band, and you’re not known already, then you have to already have a level which you can show to other musicians, and if you can’t play bass and sing at the same time then you’re stuck.
RL: I think its just practice man really. like anything else, I think if there’s a will and a desire to do it then you’ll find a way, whatever that is. You know, I did play the guitar before I played the bass, its the same four strings, in some ways it seemed easier, you didn’t have to worry about chords and all of that, anyway. I never really thought about it that much, once we got the band going, that was my role, I suppose, and I enjoy it, I really enjoy the challenge of trying to keep it interesting, keeping it weird.

SB: How do you introduce demos into the band setting?
RL: Quite often i bring in demos, the basis for the song’s there, i can do whatever i want to it in order to make it feel how i want to make it feel. But really I think, when we record now, with the band, we’re just looking for the feeling of what the song;s trying to put across, more than anything. So it can certainly help having a demo, i guess, but there again there’s also something nice about leaving that bit open, and capturing it, if you’re lucky, when you’re recording, sometimes it takes a while, certainly for us because we don’t always get it right, we know when we don’t get it right and we have to do it again.

SB: Why do you play the bass with your hand so far down near the bridge?
RL: On the rickenbacher if you play above where the metal pickguard thing is, the strings are really a lot looser, and not quite as active as they are back down by the bridge there, and thus the combination of the two, and also i can control how long i want the note to last, with this part of my hand (motions to the Hypothenar Muscles of his left hand), because its really important to leave some air in there, that’s what that enables me to do, and i think its a better groove, that’s really what we’re usually looking for, i suppose, if its a song with drums in it, and a beat. to be honest i never really think about it, i’m really intrigued, its a really great thing you’re doing, i really wish you all the best of luck, but until you contacted me, nobody’s really ever asked me, i think i did one interview for a bass magazine, “bass guitar weekly” or “monthly” or something, but apart from that, nobody’s ever really asked me about it, really, the whole thing of singing and playing at the same time, and if i did think about it, probably too much, i probably wouldn’t be able to do it.

SB: Do you consider it more difficult to sing and play with your fingers than play with a pick?
RL: No, but again its a different thing, and its probably a little bit trickier for me, because, as I said, I can do it now, because its usually about the sound, the frequency and the sound of the bass, its so important, its such an emotive frequency, the low-end, without people even being aware of it often, but all of the great bands that I’ve seen, and still see, its a really important part of it for me.

SB: Do you have any recommendations for songwriters who want to take up the bass, but don’t know where to start, or do you have any recommendations for bass-players who are challenged by the notion of singing while playing bass?
RL: Don’t give up, never give in. Take it simple to start with, is the key, and often, the greatest bass-lines are some of the simplest ones, certainly like “walking on the moon” by the Police. Its pretty straightforward, and you listen to the song and what he’s singing, the tune over the top, its great, and its not very difficult, most bass-players and singers could probably do that. its a little bit of coordination. And for me, dividing up the words and tune, the structure and the phrase of the melody, in my mind, the way i do it, is to think of where they meet, all the points where they meet together, in harmony, and if you break it down in each beat and bar, its not too difficult. Funnily enough I think, with something like “Walking on the Moon”, the great thing is the way the tune and the bass work together, its just incredible, and its not a lot, but it is the whole song! Its not complicated, for me its never about that, although I do have great regard for people like Flea who can play (complicated slap bass), its brilliant, I think its great, I don’t know how he does it, its great. But again, it depends on what you want to do, on what you want to achieve, in the songwriting, in your bass-playing and in your singing. For me its always been about putting the idea across, when it comes to a song, the feeling and the idea of the song is really what I am trying to emote, I am not really thinking about the intricacies of what I’ve got to play. (I am thinking about the intracacies of what i’ve got) to sing, to a certain extent, because my voice can only do certain things, and I think also the way that my voice works in relation to not just the bass but every instrument.

SB: Do you have any plans for playing in mainland europe in the next year or two?
RL: Yeah, we’re getting a few offers here and there to play in this country, we don’t want to do anything too soon, because we’re still figuring it out. We want to do this thing right, rather than just do the same thing again. It’s very difficult to not repeat yourself. And at the same time we don’t want to get away too much from what the band, and we can’t, because we’re the same people, but we’ve been through a lot, mutually and collectively, and we’ve come to this place which is definitely a lot deeper than where we were when we were younger. Because of that there is more of a sense of wanting to get it right, we have to be honest with ourselves, which is not always easy, its sometimes difficult and painful, but it is also joyous, when we figure out, roughly where we’re going, in terms of this record, we will start to play some shows and start to get some of the music out again, which is what we’ve already done here in LA. I think we’re going to do a show in New York, and maybe a bunch of shows up and down the eastern seaboard, and then do the same thing here on the west coast, and then see what happens as far as England goes, and Europe. We have to have a reason to play, something new to put out there, we want to get it right. I really feel great about everything we’ve done, especially the first two records, which are really good today, still. I’m really keen to give this record the best shot that we can, and take it from there, see what happens after that. This is where we’re at right now. Its important not to get ahead of ourselves. Its going really well, I think. We’re well on course, we probably have about a third of the music we need, so we’re doing pretty good.

Subscribe to The Singing Bassist to view the video for the rest of the interview!

credit: hoyasmeg	credit: Nirazilla Like all “lead-guitarists” during a guitar-solo, the guitarist of The Roots romances his fretboard and consequently ignores the audience.
The Singing-Bassist plays without looking at the guitar.

One of the largest impediments to playing bass while singing is the necessity to slide large distances on the fretboard, while looking at the crowd and not at the guitar. If the singing-bassist stares at the bass-guitar, he/she is no longer a lead-singer, but a mere bass-guitarist. Visually ignoring the bass-guitar can lead to mistakes. The singing-bassist is faced with a choice:

• either look at the bass-guitar to land on the correct position and ignore the crowd and potentially not sing into the microphone, or
• not look at the bass-guitar and potentially land on an incorrect position, needing to rectify and look at the bass-guitar!

Fretboard-landing a very frustrating reality for singing-bassists, especially when one realizes that the key to singing while playing bass is to transfer bass-playing skills from the conscious thinking brain to the fingers. (Some people mention transferring skills from the neo-cortex brain to the limbic brain but this explanation loses itself in academic abstraction).
Can the back of the neck of the bass-guitar be textured to give quick indications to the singing-bassist of the fret where the fretboard-hand is? A static haptic perceptive device, like the Braille-reading system for the visually impaired, installed on the back of the bass-guitar’s neck, could be the answer to the singing-bassist’s woe. This system could also assist visually impaired musicians to play any guitar. First, we must observe where installing this system would be most effective, and second, what would this system consist of.

A typical fret-hand position. We see here that the guitar-neck is supported by the major knuckle of the index-finger, as well as by the thumb, which leers out over the top of the fretboard.
These are the contact surfaces, in the image on the left are those on the hand, in the image on the right are those on the neck of the guitar. The surfaces on the guitar’s neck are those available for a haptic system of communicating the fretboard position to the guitarist in a non-visual way.

The open questions are the following:

• Are the small contact surfaces on the hand, the ridge of the thumb and the major knuckle of the index finger, are they sensitive enough, or can they be sensitized enough, to collect information about fretboard position on their own? (“The hand is now at the 12th fret of the guitar…”).
• Can this information be retrieved and transmitted quickly? For instance, for a song whose tempo is 180 beats per minute, the information must be retrieved, transmitted and processed in (60seconds/180beats=) 0.33 seconds. Braille reading speeds can attain 200-400 words per minute. Assuming an average word length in English of five-letters, this implies that Braille readers can obtain 1000 letters per minute.
• Mitigating factors in Braille reading speed include plasticized surfaces and heavy contact, both features of the contact between the fretboard-hand and the guitar-neck. So we can expect that non-visual fretboard-position recognition speed will be less than 1000 notes per minute. But how much slower?
• Are indentations or raised-relief marks more effective for tactile recognition?
• What is the best way to mark wood for tactile recognition?
• Is the fret-spacing lengthwise on the guitar neck too compact to achieve granularity in the perception of location, or high-resolution in the positioning?

Correlating touch and location has been investigated by Dr. Lederman at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.

It may be that sufficient tactile fretboard positioning can be achieved by simply notching the back of the guitar neck at one-place, at the octave-position for instance. But a more elaborate notching system may indeed increase visual independence and ease playing bass while singing. The superlative tactile positioning system would be so intuitive and comfortable that the singing-bassist starts “playing blindly” with no other coaxing or goading or training.

Check out the Bass-Aid as a prototype Haptic Location Device.

Sheet music is for some musicians an unnecessary abstraction: For these musicians, music should be heard and not seen.

For them, music should enter the brain via the ears (as opposed to via the eyes), and music should be expressed rather than written or printed.  These musicians often site natural sounds and noises as sources of melodic inspiration.  Does this imply that sheet-music is an abstraction written for, lets say, relatively non-musical bystanders?

Not necessarily.  Musicians who can also obtain their melodies from sheet-music have an extra source which can expand their playing capabilities, a source or medium which exists outside of his or her own sphere of audio inspiration.  For example, a musician with the ability to quickly learn to play a complicated Beethoven piece from written music can become a better musical performer from a complex source existing entirely outside of his sense of sound and intuition.

Singing Bassists who can visually ascertain from sheet music the locations where bass-notes and vocal-phrasings intersect are able to learn music-pieces faster, and of course more accurately, than singing-bassists who must mechanical (or use software to) slow down recordings to find these locations in order to train them.

Of course, in band-settings or in any collaborative music experience, the Singing Bassist who exclusively “plays by ear” will be faster to learn a new song, faster to react to changes, because that Singing Bassist habitually relies on the Ear to start any musical endeavour, from tuning the Bass up to writing a song.

Musicians able to read music as well as “play music by ear” take advantage of a broader tool-set than musicians who only read music or who only stubbornly “play by ear”, and are thus able to musically progress faster than their uni-sourced counterparts.

Introduction

Singing while playing bass is a challenge, albeit a worthwhile one. There is a tendency for those who are new to this art to speed up their bass line when they start singing. The reason for this is that your brain is excited about trying this new venture out and it seems to take a while for the correct neurons to connect properly. Having played been a singing bass player (and closely watched many others, including Paul McCartney, Jack Bruce, Chris Squire and Greg Lake), I’m excited about being asked to write this article. It covers my thoughts on the subject in as succinct a way as I can put it.

Your Choice

If you’re starting out as a bass player, or if you’re switching from another instrument and you want to sing, you have a choice to make. You can either have fun working at becoming good at singing/playing or you can look amateurish standing on stage. If you’re reading this website (and this article) it sounds like you’ve made the right choice.

For you, there has to be some guiding standard; an inner spark and desire to be good at combining the two and – equally importantly – staying on the beat. The desire might well come from the drummer you’re playing with who should expect you to stay on the beat and be able to play and sing as well. The desire might come from a drive for excellence on your behalf. It might come from the knowledge that if you fall off the beat, if you speed up while singing, you’re going to suck right in front of your audience. How many times have I seen a bass player do that? Well, not real often, but when I do, I think to myself,
“Here’s a bass player who has decided not to work to become professional”.
Hopefully you don’t want people saying this about you.

EXERCISES

Two vital things about playing bass and singing are, 1) Getting to know every note on the neck of your bass without looking and 2) Learning how to play in rhythm along with a drummer while singing. Following are some exercises you might want to try.

1. Find a song that has a driving bass line and a vocal that you want to sing. One of the first songs I learned to play and sing was the Beatles’ Hey Bulldog. Later, in the eighties, Addicted To Love was that song for me. It’s a good one to practice to. If you can master playing and singing that along with a drummer (or the CD), you’ll be able to sing a lot of other songs. Green Day has a lot of songs that are a challenge to play and sing. Find ones that you like, songs that challenge you, and learn how to do them.
2. Practice singing 12-bar blues with a walking bass line while singing. Play heavy and make the bass line walk all over the neck – up and down – not just follow established bass walking patterns. The important thing is not to get stuck only playing in E or A. What if you get in a horn band? Better practice Bb. And best to practice in all keys….every one of them.
3. A great exercise to get to know the neck without looking is to pick a note, any note and then find that note on the neck in four places. Go through every note by fifths (i.e. start with E, B, F#, C#, Ab, Eb, Bb, F, C, G, D, A). Find four notes quickly for each note. If you can’t find one, stop and locate them then start the exercise from that note. Do this without looking at the neck.
4. If you can get a drummer to spend time helping you out, play (while singing) with that drummer for hours on end. Have the drummer listen carefully to your rhythm and if you fall off his/her beat in any way, have them do something to let you know. Back in the day I did this with my drummer brother for hours. It was effective because out of some sort of pride I would not want the guy to let me know I was falling off the beat. That caused me to stay on the beat out of anguish.

You may well come up with exercises that work better for you.

In the end, the idea is to get to where you’re not thinking of the bass part so much, but of your vocal performance. What you’re singing is what most people catch on to; what you’re playing on bass should be coming naturally if you’ve prepared.

This is not a source for tips on “how to write a song”, although interviewees will be asked how they write songs, whether they write songs on the bass, etc. Courses on Songwriting are quite imposing, aren’t they? How can somebody teach other people how to express themselves?

This is also not a source for tips on “how to play <instrument> by ear.”  Courses which claim to do so present a curious pedagogical conflict.  Are there any courses on the following topics?

• “How to inhale and exhale”
• “How to write ambidextrously”
• “How to stand on your head”

Or even more extravagantly with Expert-Advice?

• “How to ride a bike, taught in 23 lessons by Lance Armstrong”

I suppose that developing such curricula is possible if you can convince people of their need for such advice, but…. Such topics are either so self-evident, or the ratio teaching/learning is so immense, that endeavoring to publish a method on them seems impossible.

Thus, the Singing Bassist is restrained to topics on fine-motoric coordination for playing the bass-guitar while singing.

The Guitar-Strumming Singer-Songwriter often merely needs to strum a few standard chords which accompany his or her vocal-melody in order to proclaim the birth of a new song. Guitars, and especially Acoustic Guitars, are lovely chordal instruments, supplying six notes with each and every upstroke (and with each downstroke). In some ways, the six-stringed guitar simulates an entire band in and of itself, the strumming pattern supplying percussion, the deeper three strings providing the emotive bass-frequencies, and the higher three strings accompanying the vocal melodies. Writing demos for a band on an acoustic guitar is a logical choice, because the strumming pattern plus vocal melody sets out the parts for all of the band members. In more ways, songwriting with an acoustic guitar is TOO easy.

The songwriting singing-bassist must endure longer journeys in birthing new song. Donning the cape labeled “Vocalist”, he or she begins a song with a rhyme or poem set to melody. Maybe this melody is accompanied by a chordal instrument such as a piano or a six-stringed guitar during the first months after conception. Donning the bassist hat, the chordal accompaniment is filled-in or adorned with an expressive bass-line that must simulate and even replace the chords with an ornate string of single notes. And wait, low and behold, this concatenation of single notes must in some way fit with the often frenetic participation of a drummer!

Once the bass-line is invented, the two sometimes contrapuntal, often completely dissociate compositions for the Vocals and for the Bass-Guitar must be united for the end-product of the singing-bassist, which is the schizophrenic “song and dance” of performing a completed song. One quickly sees that the gestation period for a song written by a singing-bassist is necessarily longer than that for a song written by a singing-guitarist. However, the singing-bassist probably acknowledges and embraces this fact, much in the same way certain connoisseurs prefer aged wine to recent swill, or home-cooking to fast-food. A slow brew ensures a deep character.

It must be mentioned that certain singing-bassists elect to outsource the authoring of vocals.

• Jack Bruce collaborated with lyricist Pete Brown in Cream
• Rush is a Canadian rock band … composed of bassist, keyboardist, and lead vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.

In these band formations one quickly perceives that the songwriter views himself primarily as a composer and performer. Possibly the topic of the song’s text is mutually agreed upon between lyricist and vocalist, but then the singing-bassist is tasked with weaving his bass-work together with the work of his lyricist (and furthermore with the drummer of his band).

The case-study of Rush could become a doctoral thesis about the consummate singing-bassist, and not in the least because of the fact that it is the drummer who authors the lyrics for the singing-bassist. Does Neil Peart strive for creating non-intuitive vocal rhythms to propel Geddy Lee to ever-increasing feats of musical coordination? Many open questions for interviews….. In any case we are overwhelmed with the impression that Rush always strives to “keep it in the family“.

Returning back to the point of this post, I speculate that songwriting for singing-bassists is more time-consuming because of the fact that it is more all-encompassing.

The autobiography of Suzi Quatro, the first female Rock Singing-Bassist. This fine read is entitled Unzipped and it details her rise from suburban Detroit to commanding the stages as a Singing-Bassist around the world. She is very representative of a time when playback was non-existent, and when instrumental virtuosity was a paramount feature in the career of every musician. I zone out watching her performances on youtube wondering where all those notes came from and then realizing that they all emanate from that 5’1″ girl in the leather jump suit with a bass-guitar looking too big for her frame! To my knowledge she was also the first Singing-Bassist as a solo-act. Meaning, although she most likely could have recruited a bass-guitarist to perform for/with her, she opted to keep playing and singing.

I read this book as a source of general research on singing bassism, and found the following anecdotes of particular relevance:

• Suzi plays piano, guitar, percussion and bass-guitar
• she was urged to play bass-guitar at the age of 14 by her sister Patti for their groundbreaking group (as an all-female rock band), The Pleasure Seekers, whose rotating lead-singer position meant that Suzi became a Singing Bassist at the same time as becoming a bassist
• started on a wide-necked Fender Precision bass, then switched to a smaller necked guitar and experienced large leap in capability
• first record deal with the Pleasure Seekers at 14 years old, then recording one song as lead-singer
• states that her proficiency on the bass-guitar was obtained in a follow-up group, the jam-band Cradle, which featured instrumental-solos often exceeding 5 minutes in duration. Played mostly festival appearances in the US midwest.
• whisked off to England by producer Mickie Most to start her solo career at the age of 20. Kept playing the bass-guitar for her solo career!
• Often recorded as a Band in the Room, singing and playing bass-guitar
• Of all the hundreds of songs she has performed, Suzi needed practice in order to sing and play only one song in her entire career as a Singing-Bassist!
• Writes Songs on Piano, and occasionally performs live on the Piano

Unzipped is a fascinating account of how a normal suburban girl-next-door becomes a bass-guitar playing band-leader, owning the songs, owning the stage, owning her crowd. Suzi opened the door for instrument-playing rocker-girls, and did that all the while playing the bass and singing, bravo!