The Trip to Sonic Ranch

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Music Adventure Intro

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‘Bout time for another adventure, wouldn’t you say? This one has a lot longer time scope than my previous adventures. So Ima have to back way up in time to get you up to speed.  Where to start? Mom and dad sat next to each in the band at North Bend High School in North Bend Oregon. I have no pictures of this. Wish I did. Pretty sure mom played an old silver baritone and dad played a cornet but that would make one or the other of them last seat. I’ll ask.  I am the youngest of four siblings and all were encouraged in music and allowed to choose their instruments, and I think there is an innate, if not enforced selection of a different instrument for each child. The eldest, Jeff played a beautiful silver trumpet. Sister Barb played a tenor saxophone. Brother Chris played trombone. Arriving last, I really had little choice, and was forced to pick up mom’s old silver Baritone. It wasn’t all that bad. It was narrower in diameter than the modern horns of the tim...
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Finally Learning How to Play

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By this time I'd been thumping along for a few years now and had played in a small variety of bands. Then along came Simba What can I say about Simba.  His name is actually Humphrey.  He called himself Simba because it suited him better.  He was raised in Kenya and schooled in English schools -- highly educated and spoke English far better than almost everyone in Idaho.  A genuinely beautiful man with his lanky, Jimmy Hendrix-ish frame, rich coffee colored skin, perfect ball-shaped afro and an impeccably trimmed beard after the Greek fashion that came to a flat point an inch below his chin.  When Simba first looked at you, you were sure you were the only human in the world that mattered to him at that moment.  Quite a presence. Paul introduced me to Simba, who was looking for a bassist.  At the time I only had the big blue acoustic, so that's what we went with.  Just me, Simba playing guitar, and Paul on the mandolin at first.  It took ...
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Figuring Out How to Play

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Playing the Bass, Explained In the previous entry I explained how a "song" works, and roughly how a bass works, and included pictures of my new bass and a description of learning how to play roughly 30% of my Spotify play list.  A little more detailed description of how to play a bass is necessary. If this bores you, you may want to move on to the next entry which will detail a few of the early bands I was in, with pics and a few Soundcloud recordings (if I figure out how to upload songs to Soundcloud). As I described in the first blog of this series, when they teach you to play music in the school system, they only teach you to read and play the notes as written, and to behave yourself and don't cause problems.  But they don't really teach you why you are playing the specific notes that you are, or why the composer arranged the bass line in that way.  So you have to just know or figure it out. I talked about this a little in the second entry.  The bass essenti...
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