Bass Players don't get any Love

     When I was about 15 years old, I had the sudden urge to learn how to play guitar. I really don't remember why, except that it had something to do with me wanting to make electronica music and synthesizers at the time just confused me. The synthesizer confusion instantly killed the hard-on I had for making electronica, so I decided to learn guitar. Not to mention, I've always wanted to experiment with guitars. Even to this day, the lack of guitar in a lot of electronica music baffles me and I'd love to try to mess around with that.

     Anyway, like all the other cool kids my age, I had this idea that I was gonna learn guitar, become famous, have girls all over me, and make enough money to buy the moon. My first guitar cost me only $79, but that didn't keep me from feeling any less badass. For a few hours, I looked down on rest of the world, because I knew that I was better than everyone else.

My life IN THE FUTURE

     I seriously spent about 5 minutes playing that guitar before giving up the instrument and life altogether. It was difficult, the instrument was uncomfortable, and most of all the damn strings hurt my fingers. Maybe I got so mad that I started to strangle the guitar, but by the time I had gave up, my hand was bleeding. Not just a few drops either, it was if I had just slammed my hand onto a nail. Even now, while I can play guitar decently, I'm still afraid to play without a a guitar pick for this very reason.

Guitar picks kind of look like hearts. There's a reason for this.

     All hope was lost, I was never going to be a sexy, rich musician who would never have a real job. Two years went by in which I had pretty much shunned anything with strings on it. That was until I got a bass guitar for Christmas from my mother. She knew how apathetic I was towards the guitar, so maybe she thought that a bass would reignite my passion for music that didn't involve me spending even more time on the computer to create... or maybe she was playing a sick joke on me. Either one is very possible.

     Unlike the guitar, I surprisingly fell in love with the bass. It was easy to learn the basics and it doesn't murder my hand when playing it. Quickly, I became the best bass player at school (Which wasn't difficult, because I knew like three other people that played bass). I joined multiple bands over that one and a half year period that I was still in highschool and played a good amount of concerts. It was an overall awesome experience, but I noticed one difference between the bass players and the guitar players with all the bands I dealt with.

     As said before, if you're a guitar player in a band that isn't completely terrible, everyone instantly thinks you're awesome and you immediately become twenty times more fuckable. This isn't the same for us bass players. We tend to be forgot about, hiding at the back of the stage during concerts, and rarely do any of us sing. With the way a lot of music is mixed, it's not rare to hear harder rock genres where the bass is barely audible. People, for whatever reason, just aren't impressed by bass players. I wish I knew the answer for this, maybe it's because the instrument is somewhat ugly, maybe because electric guitars allow for more showing off than basses, or maybe us bass players just tend not to have awesome flamboyant personalities that people love. All I know is that people have some weird biased love for singers and guitar players, that we'll be lucky to ever see.