Practice Setup(s)

Back in the late 1900s when I started learning to play bass my practice setup was pretty simple. I had a combo amp that was too small to actually reproduce most bass frequencies and on top of that sat one of those watermelon shaped portable boomboxes that were so ubiquitous at the time. This setup was simple, functional, and just worked. It was the perfect setup, even when it turned your cassette into shiny black spaghetti. The cassette deck usually contained a tape full of songs that I’d recorded off the radio, often featuring a DJ talking over the beginning or the end (or both!) of each song. I’d just listen to the music and try to figure out what notes they were playing and in what order. Pause the music to figure out the more complicated sections, rewind to hear it over and over again until it sounds just right, and years later learn that roughly half of it was incorrect. With the rise of personal computers and media sharing software a few years later we would trade those…