Bass and Bible Study

(Personal Blog Post)

An unexpected day off. Good, I need the rest as well as some time to chew on what's been happening…

Playing for Sunday service was interesting. The music director took the bass (usually he's on one of the other instruments). You see, there are two sorts of people who play bass, those who really understand harmony and those who don't. Those who don't will play the bass notes they are supposed to, just like what's on the CD or what's written on the chord chart. Those who do may actually change the chords of the song on the fly to better fit the energy of the moment.

That's what the director did on Sunday. For example, one of the songs had a simple F – Bb – C – F progression that came out for both the verses and the chorus. And we knew the worship leader was going to camp on this song quite a bit. So the director did a pedal point thing, playing an F note on the bass throughout the changes, making them:

F – Bb/F – C/F – F

What this does is that it creates a lot of musical tension. People subconsciously expect the bass note to change with the chords, and when the bass note doesn't it creates a sense of building up. If you do something like that, you can actually go back to the original bass line later on in the song (maybe the last chorus, for example) and that would give the song a huge burst of energy.

If you want to be a bassist who can control the music in this fashion, you need to really know the notes of the chords. Like how a C major chord is made up of C, E and G, how a C minor chord is C, Eb and G and all that. You will also need to have a good sense of chord progressions, when a melody line allows for more than one possible set of chords to be used, so you can decide when to change the chords for a better musical effect.

Finally, you need musicians who will keep out of your way. There's no point on the bassist keeping to the F note in the changes, for example, if the pianist will still continue playing the F, Bb and C notes in the lower registers of the piano. That way, you end up with a muddy sound in the bass part of the sound mix. Bad…

If you are a pianist or guitarist in a band with this kind of bassist, you need to listen carefully to the bass at all times to recognize when the bassist is changing the notes. When that happens, keep yourself out of the way! One of the best bassists I know personally once told me that he enjoys having me on the keyboard, not just because of my piano skills, but also because I keep out of his way. Many other keyboardists he plays with don't care, they just happily clutter up the sound trying to play along with the bassist (and messing things up)…

By the way, that bassist was the buddy who helped me to record my Youtube vid on auditioning church pianists . When I talked about keeping out of the way of the bassist, he was giving me two thumbs up from behind the camera. It was only that day, after the video recording, that I found out how other keyboardists bugged him so much!

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Another thing: it's nearing the end of the year now. I started doing inductive Bible study on the books of the New Testament this year. The goal was to cover one book each month, so I am supposed to be done with Colossians by now. But because I got massively distracted a few times this year, I am only up to Ephesians.

Yeah, I set Bible study goals for myself and FAIL too, just like many other believers!

Since I am expecting a bit more free time this December, I'll be able to catch up on the books I need to work on to get myself back on schedule and ready for next year. The key point, however is this: even though I didn't meet up with my own expectations and achieve my own goal for Bible study this year, I still got a lot more Bible study done than I would have if I did not decide to do it.

Yes, I could have still kept on cruising with the way things were last year. I was already spending a lot of time in God's Word even without the inductive study, so I wasn't too shabby. But because I set the goal this year and kept at it most of the time, I put myself in a place where God could reveal to me more and more of himself through his Word. And that's always good!

So if you have been setting goals for yourself and failing, or starting on New Year's Resolutions and quitting them by February, don't lose heart! All you need to do is to make sure that you go further, do more and last longer than the last time you tried. That's called progress, isn't it?