Got my Bass guitar!

I remember when I was 14 years old. I was raging at how unfair my privileged life was and how “no-one really understands” by listening to the latest craze at the time, colloquially defined as “nu-metal”.

Finding the bass

One of the biggest bands from that era was KoRn. And my interest had gone so deep that I spent hours looking at live DVDs… which made me look at what the bass player was doing.

Now, I was versed enough to know what the bass player did in a band per se… but I found myself being really deeply engrossed in the playing of Fieldy, the bass player for KoRn. I kept on scouring the internet for more clips of bass players and I soon came to the conclusion that I had always resonated with songs that had classic bass lines.

My father had raised me well on foundational music like Motown and Deep Purple and all that… so now that I found myself figuring out my own identity it suddenly felt like a calling.

I want to be a bass player.

So I bothered my parents about it until they gave me an ultimatum. “If we buy you a bass you need to go to extracurricular music school until you graduate”. Fine with me!

The first band

Eventually I found a bunch of friends at school that wanted to start a band together and now they were all eager for me to get my equipment.

My first bass was a four string J&D with a rosewood fret-board, a tone knob and a volume knob.

I plugged this into the 120 Eden Nemesis that my parents also gave me. We figured it would have to be big enough for me to bring to some gigs, you see.

By this point the nu-metal craze had died out and the second wave of metalcore was the thing everyone talked about. Bands that regurgitated riffs from Swedish melodic death metal giants such as At The Gates, in other words. Bands like As I Lay Dying, Unearth, Darkest Hour, August Burns Red. I was a huge fan of Norma Jean and Every Time I Die at the time.

But we were a bunch of misfits that got along. Our vocalist was more into the post-hardcore stuff and I was still engrossed in my old nu-metal heroes on top of this new stuff. Our lead guitarist, the insanely talented Erik Rivera, brought all kinds of funny influences from obscure internet bands and we even borrowed some riffs from bands we had yet to really pay proper respect to like Dimmu Borgir and Amon Amarth.

We played together for a good couple of years and it was a really good way for me to channel my energy during my most confusing period as a teenager, for sure.

You can listen to whatever demos we made at your own risk… remember, we were like 15 years old here.

We later disbanded when the drummer decided that he’d rather chase after girls or something…

Seedna

And it would take all the way until 2013 until the brother of my first girlfriend, Z, wanted to start a band with me. By this point I was really into this Umeå-based post-metal band called Cult of Luna. Lonely, stoic, massive metal music that borrows a lot from metal giants like Neurosis.

I bought an old five string Peavey Foundation at a flea market if I remember correctly. Most of my extreme metal heroes played more than four strings, so it felt inevitable.

We found two brothers that were kind of into the same thing, we were planning on a release together, they switched up a lot of their focus and one brother in particular wanted us to work according to some plan to render quantifiable results… in the end we bowed out and decided to do something on our own… but I ended up honoring the release made by the band, now titled Seedna, and I have mastering credit for the debut release, Tindalos.

Here’s a video of me, Z and the other members jamming on the earliest tracks.

Going darker

After that me and Z decided we wanted to aim for something more menacing. By now I had routed all the way back to my love for hardcore punk (of the regional kind, like the crust punk of M:40 or Grace.Will.Fall) and Z was going all into black metal. We recruited a guitarist, I spent way too much money on recording equipment and practice space expenses and a whole lot of time was invested into turning it into a dream.

I bought a vintage Crumar Stringman, a real rarity, to bring some mellotron gloom and Emperor-vibes to the mix. I also made an honestly stupid investment into a six string Warwick Corvette bass that I loved oh so very much yet never learned how to play properly.

And we refined that dream quite well. Enough to where we had almost the entire cast of former local legends Visio Mortis playing in our band at some point.

Losing focus

But I had lost my focus. I stopped thinking about developing my skills as a bass player in favor of being this obtuse band leader and producer, and by the time we had some REALLY potent demos… I had practically nothing to show for it. I kept postponing laying down my tracks because whenever I recorded myself I became obsessed with sounding as good as possible. I didn’t nail parts and I was unable to play what I heard in my head. I had lost touch with the thing that gave me so much joy in my mid-teens.

I attended mixing classes at Nordic Sound Lab, shook hands with some serious players… soldered my own bass pedals… lost track of what mattered, in short. The biggest crime was definitely that the band sustained on seasoned players providing demo tracks, yet we only rehearsed together less than 5 times, because we had aged and people had jobs to tend to.

The musicians that accompanied us eventually grew tired and some members joined the ranks of bands like ENVIG, which is a fantastic death metal band with a lot of Bolt Thrower and Entombed influence.

The demos we made are still really really really good though. I hope they’ll surface one day. In my dreams we produced and printed that 7 inch and a lot of misunderstood youth got their hands on it.

Starting over in Portugal

Fast forward, even skipping past the little project I had with a newly found friend, the son of my Beer School-teacher, and Z as per usual… yeah… I was tired of my situation and needed to move to the woman I love.

So, naturally, I sold all of my equipment! …well, I sold what I could and then I gifted the rest to close friends.

Once I settled in Portugal and had my first job and a lot of things about my life are not as I’m used to… eventually the itch came back. After my third or so salary I could no longer resist. I bought a tiny little practice amp, the Ibanez Promethean, and then I bought the Ibanez Soundgear SR300E SVM.

I returned to four strings because I definitely did most of my years playing one, so finding my way back to it and having this mature intent to get as good as I can at the standard is what fuels me now as I’ve passed the age of 30.

And compared to my biggest musical excursion, the roles were inverse… no one was invested… no one cares… it’s just me and my bass.

And I can already feel that my best times with this instrument are yet to come.