my experience playing in big bands? okay, 'where do gigs come from?'
well most gigs come from for me these days they come from calls from people
that I've networked with and maybe impressed, hopefully impressed, when I got
a call to play with Megadeth it was my friend Alan who worked over at the ESP
Guitar Company and he gave me a call and he said hey James what are you doing
I said it won't nothing at this moment he goes you want to be in a really big
metal band and I said sure! And so uh he said okay well why don't you send me a
package with your CD and some metal stuff and I said well I have too much of
that but here you go and he sent it off to Dave Mustaine and before you knew it
Dave had me on the phone and that's the way that one happened the thing I pride
myself on and being what I call it 'journeyman bass player' is that I'm
always prepared for a gig I always take the time to understand the band I'm
going to be in. I try and do as much background research as I can I try to
understand the type of music I'm going to be playing which you know I've been
studying a lot of different genres of music my whole life so that's not too
hard but I really like to kind of focus on the way this man feels the way the
drummer plays the way he played on the original records if it wasn't him what
was that like and this way when I show up there I can try and make everybody in
the room feel comfortable having said all that sometimes you just have to
bring your own personality and your own ability and that's something else you
keep in your pocket you play long enough you'll have your own sound you'll have
your own way of playing and you can basically just kind of open that up
anytime you need to and sometimes mixing that with what
people expect can give them just a little more excitement about you
it's very important to understand your role in the band too
when I joined Megadeth for instance I was aware that Dave Elson played most
probably everything with a pick and I was at that point I was pretty much a
finger player although I had you know I had enough experience playing with a
pick just for my own amusement and recording stuff like that yeah I came in
and I just you know I worked strictly with a with a pick
and that seemed the right way to go at one point Davis even said you know
you can play it with your fingers if you want and I kind of thought yeah I could
but I don't know if it's gonna sound like 'Megadeth' so I stayed that way
but anyway to have as much variety and your playing as possible is always a
bonus so I mean if you can slap hey I can do all the tricks it's always good
to know that stuff and even if you don't use it half the time it's kind of fun to
have those parameters in your own ability
I've often said that my job basically is to dine with kings you know I play with
these big rock stars and I love it, I love being in their company there's something that sets them apart
from most people that you meet and that's how come they write all these
great songs and they make these giant wonderful bands and I always understood
that although I dined with kings that that is not my table so this is an
important lesson a few guys out there if you ever get the opportunity to play
with one of your heroes or somebody that you really dig just remember to be kind
of reverent to the situation because they're hiring you for your ability
they're not hiring you to take over the band for them
so as I've tried to demonstrate there's so many ways to approach the technical side of bass sound and recording
in the confines of this video we've only scratched the
surface so I encourage you to try different things keep experimenting and
find out what works for you as you can probably tell bass has been one of my
great life passions I hope you found this video guide informative and helpful
and thank you to the folks at Audient for creating the tools I use every day
to make my music. I'll see out on the road