Top 292 Bass Quotes

Everybody besides my piano player has been with me since the very first day. We were a four-piece band for a solid two years. It was me playing acoustic and rhythm electric guitar, a bass player, a drummer and a lead guitar player. For a couple of years, we sounded like the Foo Fighters.

I learned to MC over drum ‘n’ bass music.

I played guitar and bass. I didn’t do much vocals, although I did have one band where I was the lead singer. But that was when I was in college.

I find myself wanting to make music at the dining room table or in the bedroom – I’m kind of a mobile writer, so I sort of move around the house. But the attic is definitely where I can make the most noise. While everyone on the lower floors screams ‘Earthquake!’ But no! It’s just my bass!

The press is like a big bass, you just stick a hook in their mouth and they’ll take it.

My first instrument was bass, and the first thing that I remember learning to play that was better than a few notes was Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain.’ If you’re the guy who penned that bass riff, then you should probably be in some sort of fantasy band.

Acting had been a hobby that turned into a career, the directing was a hobby that turned into a career, and music just really allowed me to find another way to express myself. I started playing bass in November 1996, and by June 1998 I was doing my first live show.

I’ve been playing the bass guitar for almost twelve years and fretless for about nine, so I’ve got quite a bit of mileage in my hands already.

I was always the sexy bass player in the background while Robin stood centre. Barry and I played it up a bit, gave ’em a bit of thigh.

The main thing that those two albums have in common aside from my music, which of course, a sense of it, you can recognize, it is that the bass on Infinite Search was playing much, much less like a bass.

If you give me a bass guitar and you ask me to improvise something, or even be with some musicians and follow them, I wouldn’t be able to do it. And I want to change that.

The range of the cello is so big, it can play as low as the double bass and as high as the violin. It has the perfect shape, and its sound is the closest to the human voice.

Drums, bass, guitar, keys, I play a little of each of those.

And there’s always one special element. In ‘There Goes My Baby,’ it’s the out-of-tune timpani. ‘Stand by Me,’ it’s the bass pattern. Of course, all the elements come together to make a great record. But there’s always one standout.

There’s something about rhythm and bass sections generally, how the bass and drums interact, that’s basically the soul of any song.

My voice gets recognized before anything else. It’s always gotten attention. In choruses at church and school, I started as a tenor, moved to a baritone and finally became a bass. I knew then that my voice would be my instrument. Now if I want to hide, I just keep my mouth shut.

I’ve been in a band, so I understand the politics. Sometimes the bass player doesn’t like what the guitar player is doing, and you have to sort of even that out.

I just love the hypnosis of a single bass drum.

I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there’s very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.

I like a bass drum. A big one.

I’m an okay drummer, I’m an okay bass player, I’m an okay keyboardist, and I’m a quite good guitar player.

You want the personality of each performer – whether it’s singing or bass or drums or piano – to be intact. In some ways it’s much more challenging to preserve that and to also make music that sounds modern.

I grew up with the British-Chicago crossover of house music with a lot of pianos and very heavy bass lines, but what I love about house is you can mix it up a bit.

I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.

The worst words I could ever hear as a bass player was, ‘Can you play the root notes?’

For KRS-One, I have a specific sound – sparse drums and bass. I try to steer away from elaborate productions.

I realized pretty soon that I have to do more than just play bass in the background way. So, I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted.

Playin’ bass runs and singin’ lead vox, is sometimes difficult, but I have three words for you: Practice, practice, practice!

We all record together. We do it live; then, after that, we do overdubs, if we need to, to repair stuff. Usually when we do stuff, we have to make sure we get the bass and drums down, and by doing it live, you’re actually playing the song. You’re not piecing together a song.

I grew up around salsa, merengue, bachata, bass music, freestyle, hip-hop, techno, house, rave.

I didn’t grow up hunting whitetail, but I would stalk tuna and white sea bass and yellowtail.

Without getting real personal, we liked our bass player Ed. He was a great guy and he was a good bass player but his playing was suited for a different style of band.

I play guitar, bass, drums, piano, and pretty much any sort of stringed instrument – besides violin or cello.

The golden rule for playing the bass is that’s it all about feel, not just plonking away. You need to feel the sound, not using a pick or a plectrum – which has meant plenty of calluses on my fingers.

Jaco Pastorius gave the bass a new voice. I mean, he was very inspired by singers like Frank Sinatra. And in a lot of ways, maybe he wanted to be a singer himself.

I wasn’t very good at studies but was into a lot of extra-curricular activities. I used to play the keyboard and bass guitar in my school band and went on to study keyboard from Trinity College, London.

When I came into Metallica, I had to do justice to Cliff’s work, but I also had to put my own signature on it. No one could be Cliff Burton; Cliff Burton was the Jimi Hendrix of bass.

I stepped back from being out front to playing bass. So we started switching: I’d play bass on one song, we’d switch on the next song; I’d play piano… we’d play mandolin.

I find it natural to write on the bass, and a lot of people find that really odd.

Elvis Presley’s Sun stuff – there’s an album out in England with just about all those sides on it – you know, the sound of that upright bass slapping away: that’s what I like to listen to. That and Richard Pryor, that is.

I like a lot of bass players. I like a lot of tuba players too.

I learned to do a few tricks that other people hadn’t done before. I developed that trebly bass thing a little further.

I just wanted to experiment with the bass, and my main influence from Jaco Pastorius inspired me to write music in a certain way.

I used to aspire to being more of a traditional bass player, to be honest. People say I play it like a guitar – and I was a guitar player when I was growing up. I started learning when I was eight, and that’s what I was fascinated with in my teen years.

The thing I like to do when I’m making records is to keep it exciting, as opposed to, ‘There’s a bass player, guitar player… ‘ Just a little variety.

A lot of modern amps and preamps sound great when you’re jamming by yourself, but don’t hold up in a band situation. The sound isn’t dense enough, and the lows and highs tend to get soaked up by the bass and cymbals.

You can feel the drums, and you can feel the bass. So, being able to feel the music through the floor, it makes me feel like I’m a part of the band and not just the only person in the room who doesn’t really understand what’s going on.

I think people forget even though we were labelled a synth band because of ‘The Hurting,’ but keyboards are not our native instruments. Roland’s a guitar player and I’m a bass player.

I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.

The lousy guitar player in any band is the bass player.

The music that I’m known for is quiet and gentle, although when I was growing up and as a teenager, I was playing the opposite – I was screaming and playing bass and those loud electric guitars.

People think because I’m crazy, I don’t know anything. My dad played bass with Hector Lavoe, with Marc Anthony, with Ricky Martin, with people who had nothing to do with reggaeton. I grew up watching him play all kinds of instruments. It’s something I carry in my blood.

A bass should sound like a bass with the thump of the finger against the wood, like it began with stand up.

When I started playing the bass, I became kind of fascinated by it and started investigating various styles of bass playing, and I was really struck with funk music, mainly American funk music – Stanley Clarke, Funkadelic and that kind of stuff. That comes out in a couple of songs like ‘Barbarism Begins at Home.’

My girlfriend is a fashion designer. She has her own company called Rachel Antonoff. She is doing a collaboration with Urban Outfitters right now, a shoe collaboration with Bass. She sells to Barneys, stuff like that.