Bass Nation

Hellooooooo. Is anybody here? Probably not, as this is a brand spanking new blog and I don’t expect to get a whole lot of traffic on day one. But, here I am anyway with my first post because you can’t have a blog without any posts now can you? OK, enough with the small talk bullshit. You, the readers who I do not have yet, probably want to know who I am and what’s the deal with this blog, or at least you will want to know that once you start actually reading this thing. My name is Jason Buckley and I’ve been playing bass guitar on and off for 23 years.

My journey as a musician started sometime around 3rd grade when I started taking both piano and violin lessons. Fourth grade I traded the violin for an alto sax. Fifth grade I dropped piano all together because my little sister started lessons a year after I did and quickly passed the point where I was and I just couldn’t have that. In sixth grade I dropped the sax for an electric guitar. I really regret dropping these three instruments and thus ending my formal music education. I just really struggled with sight reading and the stuff they give you to play at that age is not the slightest bit cool.

I twanged around on my guitar for a while but never got particularly good at it and lost patience with it like I did with the other instruments. Then in 7th grade I went to a concert. It was Simple Minds at Radio City Music Hall, and that was the first time I felt the bass pounding through my body and I knew that’s what I wanted to play. It was also the first time I saw anybody smoking pot and I knew I wanted some of that, but that’s a whole other story! So that summer I sold my guitar and bought a used Fender Musicmaster bass with a 3/4 scale neck, and by my freshman summer I was in a hard rock cover band and actually played a few gigs. We parted ways when I discovered punk rock which I messed around with a bit without a whole lot of success.

In college I didn’t do much beyond a jam here and there, though after college I got into a band with a few of the townie kids who were still in high school but on the same musical wavelength. We played really dark and sludgy stuff and then disbanded when a few of us moved away.

I played in another couple of bands through my late twenties, upgrading my Fender with a new bridge, pickup and tuners. Then got married, moved across the country and started a family without doing much in the way of music for about 5 years. Then recently I’ve become very interested in playing again, only this time I’m taking it much more seriously. It was always fun being in bands, but I never really practiced much between our weekly rehearsals and gigs, let alone doing daily exercises to build strength and agility in my fingers. Now it’s an obsession, and although I haven’t been doing it for long, my playing is better than ever. My next step is trying to play upright.

I hope to share that obsession here on this blog. I want to share musical discoveries and influences, teach new tricks as I learn them myself, and  maybe even post some videos of myself playing.

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