
Ani DiFranco's Kay acoustic was modded by Reuben Cox of L.A.'s Old Style Guitar Shop. "He puts rubber around the bridges of guitars and they end up very funky, dead, and earthy, like an old dude on a porch suddenly playing it," she says.
The acoustic firebrand recorded with a band of masked strangers, using her modded vintage Kay acoustics for the songs of social upheaval and survival on her 22ndalbum, Revolutionary Love. Then, she got arrested.
While the world lay dormant under strict lockdowns, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and activist Ani DiFranco stepped out to make a strong political statement. DiFranco and her crew went to a Shell oil refinery to film the video for "Simultaneously," from her latest release, Revolutionary Love. They were immediately arrested for trespassing. "We were just standing by the side of the road. We didn't touch any of their shit and we didn't jump a fence," explains DiFranco. "They detained us for a long time and didn't say anything to us like, 'You're trespassing, please leave.'" The matter had to ultimately be resolved in Zoom court. "They charged each of us and we all had to pay a fine. One of the kids that was working on the video with us was working for so little that it would have negated his salary, so I paid his fine."
DiFranco's defiant nature can be traced back to her childhood. She was raised in a troubled home and took solace in the guitar, an instrument she picked up at age 9 after hearing the sounds of John Fahey around the house. At the store where she bought her 6-string, she met her guitar teacher, Michael Meldrum, and not long after started playing shows with him. DiFranco has always been fiercely independent and, when she turned 15, she became an emancipated minor. She often slept in a Greyhound bus station and even celebrated her 16th birthday there. Just before moving to New York City, she formed Righteous Babe Records at 19. "I was too impatient. I want to make a record now and I want to sell it at my gig tomorrow," says DiFranco (who had just spent the whole week painting her house by herself from morning to night, because she couldn't wait for the painters to come). "At first, I just wrote 'Righteous Babe Records' on the cassettes; then it became a reality." Without a label to handle inquiries, she left her phone number, 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, on the tapes. That number also served as an activist hotline and still exists today, doubling as the Righteous Babe store contact.
"I tune my Kay like my version of a baritone. Basically, the tuning I'm working with on that guitar for a lot of songs is C to C, so it's like standard tuning but the low and high notes are at C."
Revolutionary Love marks DiFranco's 22nd album on Righteous Babe and displays an eclectic blend of jazz, bossa nova, and folk influences. Most of the songs on Revolutionary Love were written on tour just before the lockdown began and the plan was to get the music out before the election. DiFranco and her team later decided that it would be best to release the album after the chaotic November-to-January period of the election, as all media eyes were laser-focused only on the contest. Of course, its lyric themes of resistance, deception, separation, and loving survival are no less resonant or relevant now. Because of the lockdown, DiFranco couldn't fly her band to her New Orleans home studio, so she planned to use live recordings for the album. Then fate intervened, and Brad Cook, a producer friend, offered a helping hand.
"Brad said, 'Listen, if you can get yourself here for a few days, I'll put a group of musicians together and find a place,'" recalls DiFranco. She flew out to North Carolina and embarked upon a huge leap of faith. "Because of the pandemic, the lockdown had already begun and my income had dried up," DiFranco says. "I thought, 'I really hope this works out because I'm going to invest in this situation.'"
Ani DiFranco recorded Revolutionary Love at Overdub Lane in Durham, North Carolina, with producer Brad Cook. Roosevelt Collier played pedal steel on three songs from the 11-track album.
DiFranco met the musicians for the first time ever at the session, and the impersonal nature of the masks actually helped DiFranco overcome her social anxiety. "It was interesting," says DiFranco. "Of course, I had to get over the phobia that we were in a very cramped space. I was in a homemade cotton mask and sweating and trying to get acclimated to it. But after a while, I realized it was sort of comforting, especially in that situation doing something so intimate and vulnerable with strangers in a new environment. The mask was kind of a security blanket."
The recording sessions for Revolutionary Love took place over a five-day period. During the first two days, DiFranco and drummer Yan Westerlund recorded the whole album. Then, on the following days, percussionist Brevan Hampden and keyboardist Phil Cook overdubbed their parts. After the parts were recorded, pedal-steel player extraordinaire Roosevelt Collier was recruited to lend his magic touch to three songs. Collier's playing on "Shrinking Violet" was spectacular. "I was just so floored," recalls DiFranco. "I think of the pedal steel as sort of this background color, but how he approached it was much more blues, sort of like another singer. It wasn't a color in the background. He turned it into a duet, like his guitar was answering."
Ani DiFranco plays her 1930s Gibson-made Cromwell G-4 archtop at the 2017 Cruïlla Festival at Parc del Fòrum in Barcelona, Spain.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
DiFranco road-tested the songs from Revolutionary Love long before she hit the studio. "I'm on the road all the time and I write songs along the way, so they come out immediately," she says. "Usually, my audience at the live shows hears albums way before they're released. I do really feel that sharing songs with an audience is part of my workshop. One blessing of never being played on the radio is that there are no hits. People do have some favorites, for sure, and those make good encores or show closers. When people come to my show, they know that they don't know what they're going to hear. I determined that I have about 80 songs in my head at any given time that I can pull from."
"I do really feel that sharing songs with an audience is part of my workshop. One blessing of never being played on the radio is that there are no hits."
To keep things fresh, DiFranco will spontaneously mix and match songs for the setlists with just a moment's notice given to her very capable band. "My band was born ready," DiFranco says. "I try to lob grenades at them to see what happens. You know like, 'I want to change the keys, I'm gonna move the capo,' and I'll see my bass player just play it." Songs also morph along the way, some diverging far from the recorded versions. "They evolve over time naturally. Sometimes I forget what the chords to the bridge are supposed to be, and so they change. Sometimes I come up with new ones," she continues. "Or sometimes I'm in the wrong tuning and then I'm like, 'Oh, that's a cool color.' 'Swan Dive' is a classic old song of mine. One night I started playing it, but my high E string was tuned down to C instead of D—it's supposed to be a D for that song. I loved it and I've been playing it that way for the past few years. Things mutate."
A closeup view of road-warrior Ani DiFranco's hands show her reliance on Nailene artificial nails, which she utilizes for her captivating fingerstyle technique. She's shown here playing a set with percussionist Mike Dillon at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2006
Photo by Doug Mason
In that spirit, DiFranco lets the songs progress just as organically in the studio as she does onstage. For instance, the mostly instrumental "Station Identification" was a song she and her bassist, Todd Sickafoose, and percussionist Terence Higgins, had improvised and recorded before the pandemic. "It was based on a guitar figure, once again, but then I ended up muting my guitar for most of it," DiFranco says. "You hear the guitar [sings guitar figure] come in at some point. I was actually playing that all the way through—that's what they were playing to. Then I hit mute on the guitar until a bunch of the way through. I thought I was going to add a poem or something to it, but I ended up singing a few words at the end. I thought the station identification aspect of it worked well, the way it was expressed."
Ani DiFranco's Gear
Guitars
- Kay with DeArmond gold-foil pickups and rubber bridge
- Kay parlor guitar with rubber bridge
Strings
- D'Addario XL Chromes Jazz Light (flatwounds; .011–.050 from a 7-string set)
Amps
- Carr Rambler with tremolo engaged (house amp at Overdub Lane in Durham, North Carolina where Revolutionary Love was recorded)
Effects
- None (Ani uses the tremolo from her Magnatone Twilighter in live settings)
One of the earliest pieces DiFranco learned on guitar was an arrangement of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer," and this laid the foundation for her captivating fingerpicking style. DiFranco often makes use of chords juxtaposed against bass figures, with her low and deep tunings enhancing the resonant quality of the bass notes, particularly on songs like the album's "Crocus." "I tune my Kay like my version of a baritone," says DiFranco. "Basically, the tuning I'm working with on that guitar for a lot of songs is C to C, so it's like standard tuning but the low and high notes are at C. When we were playing 'Do or Die' on the road before I recorded it, Todd had this super-slick bass line that he was working with, but then I ended up not putting bass on that song because the guitar was so deep that it didn't leave a lot of room."
Ani DiFranco started Righteous Babe Records in 1990, when she was 19, by releasing cassette tapes with her phone number written on them. The number, 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, became an activist hotline and still exists today.
It was several years ago at the Eaux Claires Music & Arts Festival that DiFranco fell in love with a particular Kay that belonged to Brad Cook. She borrowed it to sketch out many of the songs that appear on Revolutionary Love,like the title track and the album's sole instrumental, the jazzy "Confluence." "I contemplated just eloping to Mexico with this guitar, but I returned it to him. It's a Kay that was strung with flatwounds and the bridge is wrapped in rubber. It's modded out by this guy, Reuben Cox, out in L.A. [at the Old Style Guitar Shop], and this is his thing, I guess. He puts rubber around the bridges of guitars and they end up very funky, dead, and earthy, like an old dude on a porch suddenly playing it. I went and bought an identical old Kay and did the identical treatment to it. So, it's a remake of that guitar."
Beyond funky guitars, artificial nails play perhaps the most crucial part in DiFranco's sound. When she heard that her favorite line of Nailene nails was going to be discontinued, she panicked and hoarded every kit she could find. DiFranco's dependence on them may soon start to shift, however. "I am starting to think, 'What kind of guitar player am I gonna be when these nails are gone?' It's gonna be way harder for me to get onstage with naked fingers, but I'm starting to think about playing with my actual fleshy fingers." says DiFranco. "So, I actually played this record and the release show—given it was at my home—without my talons glued to my fingers."
YouTube It
A bossa nova-influenced, two-chord pattern that loops throughout serves as the backdrop for Ani DiFranco's political message on her solo rendition of "Do or Die."
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Fender introduces the Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster, paying tribute to the iconic guitarist's heavily modified instrument. Featuring two signature humbuckers, a custom single coil bridge pickup, Bigsby tremolo, and a unique "Destruct" circuit, this Telecaster allows players to channel Campbell's legendary tone and style.
Today, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (FMIC) and the Fender Custom Shop (FCS) introduce the newest member of the ‘Stories Collection’ family—a series of instruments that pays tribute to iconic Fender guitars and basses that have been uniquely modified by the legendary artists who played them. Mike Campbell, the tasteful and versatile player who is responsible for some of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ most memorable riffs, has teamed up with Fender and the Custom Shop to develop the Stories Collection Mike Campbell signature guitars - the Red Dog Telecaster and FCS Limited Edition Masterbuilt 1972 “Red Dog“ Telecaster—two reproductions of Campbell’s stunning and heavily modified Telecaster that gives players the opportunity to create their own sonic identity through the framework of one of rock and pop’s greatest guitar players.
“Telecasters are the heart and soul of rock and roll music and this one is a beautiful instrument,” said Mike Campbell. “I could tell The Red Dog was special as soon as I picked it up. It felt like it was in the right place at just the right time. The humbuckers give it so much power and such a wide variety of tones while the destruct button really sets it apart from just about any other tele.”
The tale of the Red Dog Telecaster began when one of Campbell’s former students living in Florida offered to sell him a guitar. However, after seeing the guitar in question, it became clear that this was no standard instrument pulled from the rack. Campbell was presented with a bright red Tele equipped with humbuckers in the neck and middle position, a Bigsby tremolo and, perhaps the guitar’s most idiosyncratic flourish, an onboard electronic boost dubbed the “destruct” circuit. As any other lifelong guitar devotee would, Campbell bought this glorious Frankenstein of an instrument without a moment’s hesitation. The Red Dog was subsequently used most memorably on the Heartbreaker’s track “Refugee” and is prominently featured in the song’s music video. All throughout his storied career playing with Tom Petty, as a session guitarist, alongside Fleetwood Mac and touring the world with his solo act The Dirty Knobs, this singular Telecaster has been inextricably linked to Campbell’s career and legacy as one of rock and roll’s finest players.
The Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster offers the same level of craftsmanship and sonic capability at a more accessible price point. The two signature Mike Campbell humbuckers in the neck and middle position bring a low-end growl and high octane output that sets it apart from other Telecaster guitars. However, the custom single coil bridge pickup delivers the caliber of twang that people worldwide associate exclusively with Tele guitars. A Bigsby B5F tremolo allows players to extenuate riffs and solos with an additional level of flourish and attitude. Perhaps the Red Dog’s most exciting feature lies beneath the surface—the “Destruct” circuit. With the push of a sleek silver button on the control plate, an added 34 dB of gain can be activated for complete tonal dominance.
“It’s our mission to honor the legacy and sonic character that Mike Campbell has infused into every note played on his beloved ‘Red Dog’ Telecaster®,” said Justin Norvell, Executive Vice President of Fender Products. “Every scratch, modification, and battle scar tells a story, and with these meticulously crafted recreations, we’re giving players everywhere the chance to channel that same timeless energy and write their own musical history.”
While the Red Dog Telecaster came into his hands already modified, its custom features were universal and powerful enough to elevate Campbell’s personal playing style and the same can be said for Fender’s painstakingly detailed and powerfully crafted recreations. The FCS Limited Edition Masterbuilt 1972 “Red Dog” Telecaster is a jaw dropping representation of the instrument as it exists today—dings, paint chips, dents and all by FCS’s Senior Masterbuilder Dennis Galuska. Outfitted with vintage replica Arcane, Inc. pickups and signature “Destruct” boost circuit wired by Analogman, this custom Telecaster can achieve the same biting jangle heard on “Refugee.” Features include a flat sawn maple neck with custom Oval “C” back shape, 7.25” radius fingerboard, 21 vintage upgrade frets, 5-way pickup sector and vintage style Jazzmaster bridge with threaded saddles.
“The ‘Red Dog’ Telecaster® is a testament to how a heavily modified instrument can be both deeply personal and universally cherished,” said Chase Paul, Director of Product Development - Fender Custom Shop. “There’s an undeniable magic in an instrument that evolves alongside its player, and every modification on this guitar serves a purpose, working together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Dennis Galuszka and the Custom Shop dedicated countless hours to faithfully recreating every detail, bringing players and fans as close to Mike’s legendary Tele® as possible.”
Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster® ($3,499.99) Revered for his tasty rhythms and fiery leads, Mike Campbell is responsible for many of the iconic hooks from the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers catalog. For decades now his faithful Fender guitars have been at the heart of his trusted formula for award-winning tone.Campbell bought what became known as the “Red Dog” from a former guitar student in Florida, complete with Bigsby tremolo and a powerful onboard boost, known as the “Destruct” circuit. Mike’s iconic 1972 Red Dog Telecaster is featured on the Damn the Torpedoes track “Refugee” and can be seen in the accompanying music video. The Stories Collection Mike Campbell “Red Dog” Telecaster features an Heirloom™ nitrocellulose lacquer “Red Dog Red” finish, 1-piece maple neck with 7.25” radius fingerboard and 21 vintage-style frets as well as an onboard “Destruct” boost circuit. The custom Mike Campbell Red Dog pickup set features two vintage-style humbuckers and a single-coil Telecaster bridge pickup, Bigsby B5F tremolo and a custom Red Dog neck plate. Custom accessories include a vintage-style case, strap, picks and certificate of authenticity.
Unique, versatile and utterly original, The Mike Campbell “Red Dog” Telecaster pays tribute to a veteran Heartbreaker with a serious knack for writing extraordinary songs and delivering catchy, captivating and magnificent guitar parts.
Fender Custom Shop Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 “Red Dog” Telecaster® ($20,000.00) With raw, powerful riffs and explosive leads, Mike Campbell firmly established himself as one of the greatest guitarists and songwriters in music history—and throughout his accomplished career, Fender guitars played in integral role in his creative expression. One of his most noteworthy instruments was his modified three-pickup Telecaster that would come to be known as the “Red Dog.” Fender Custom Shop Senior Masterbuilder Dennis Galuszka partnered with Mike to recreate this incredible guitar. From beautifully faded red metallic finish to the worn and Bigsby B5 vibrato tailpiece, every nick, ding and scratch was meticulously replicated to bring this tribute guitar to life. Loaded with vintage replica Arcane, Inc. pickups and a “Destruct” boost circuit wired by Analogman, this Tele plays, sounds and feels just like the guitar heard on “Refugee.” Its two-piece select alder body and custom-shaped, one-piece maple neck feature a well-loved Relic® lacquer finish, while the hardware is aged to look like it’s been played for the last five decades. Wonderfully unique and with a storied past, the Limited Edition Masterbuilt Mike Campbell 1972 “Red Dog” Telecaster is a fitting homage to such an incredibly captivating and inspiring musician. Other premium features include flat sawn maple neck with custom Oval “C” back-shape, 7.25” (184.1 mm) radius, 21 vintage upgrade (45085) frets, 5-way switch, 3-ply parchment pickguard, vintage-style Jazzmaster® bridge with threaded steel saddles, vintage-style “F”-stamped tuning machines, bone nut, two American Vintage ‘65+ string trees with nylon spacers, deluxe hardshell case, strap and certificate of authenticity.
For more information, please visit fender.com.
Fender Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Telecaster Electric Guitar - Red Dog Red
Stories Collection Mike Campbell Red Dog Tele, MapExpansive range of subtle thickening and focusing tones to fuzz. Great alternative to run-of-the-mill overdrive and fuzz. Enables surgical shaping of guitar sounds within a mix.
Interactive, sometimes sensitive controls make certain tones elusive and lend the pedal a twitchy feel.
$179
Catalinbread Airstrip
With the preamp from a Trident A-Range console as their target, Catalinbread conjures up a varied gain device that can massage or mangle your guitar tone.
Replicating a recording console preamp in a pedal is a pretty elementary idea, but it’s inspired stompboxes as varied as theJHS Colour Box andHudson Broadcast. All recording desks—and the pedals that imitate them—have their own color. Catalinbread’s Airstrip chases the sound of a Trident A-Range channel strip. (Search “Trident Studios” to get a handle on the kind of clientele the place attracted back in the ’60s and ’70s).
Presently, a new Trident A-Range channel strip costs thousands of dollars. An original? Well, only 13 desks were made, so you can probably get a nice used Rolls Royce for less—if you can find one. Rightly then, one should temper expectations about how well a $179 pedal can ape a priceless console. But like many preamps in a box, the Airstrip excels at a wide range of gain-shaping tasks, from surgical boost and EQ shadings to fuzzy, filtered, ready-to-rip-through-a-mix Jimmy Page/Beatles/Neil Young-style direct-to-desk tones. Even at extremes, the Airstrip is sensitive to touch, volume, and tone dynamics, enabling pivots from light (if very focused) overdrive to ’60s germanium-fuzz-like sounds with changes in guitar volume and tone. And though it’s dynamic and responsive, at many settings it also exhibits lovely compression tendencies, softening transients before giving way to wide-vista tone blooms—a great recipe for spare, lyrical, melodic leads with a ’60s biker-flick-soundtrack edge. Without any of its market-leading competitors around for comparison, it’s hard to say exactly how the Airstrip aligns with their EQ biases and core tones. What is certain is that there are scores of mellow to unconventionally aggressive colors here to explore.
AI, which generated this image in seconds, can obviously do amazing things. But can it actually replace human creativity?
Technology has always disrupted the music biz, but we’ve never seen anything like this.
AI has me deeply thinking: Is guitar (or any instrument) still valid? Are musicians still valid? I don’t think the answer is as obvious as I’d like it to be.
As a professional musician, I’ve spent the vast majority of my days immersed in the tones of tube amps, the resistance of steel strings under my fingers, and the endless pursuit of musical expression. Each day, I strive to tap into the Source, channel something new into the world (however small), and share it. Yet, lately, a new presence has entered the room—artificial intelligence. It is an interloper unlike any I’ve ever encountered. If you’re thinking that AI is something off in the “not-too-distant future,” you’re exponentially wrong. So, this month I’m going to ask that we sit and meditate on this technology, and hopefully gain some insight into how we are just beginning to use it.
AI: Friend or Foe?
In the last 12 months, I’ve heard quite a bit of AI-generated music. Algorithms can now “compose,” “perform” (with vocals of your choosing), and “produce” entire songs in minutes, with prompts as flippant as, “Write a song about__in the style of__.” AI never misses a note and can mimic the finer details of almost any genre with unnerving precision. For those who are merely curious about music, or those easily distracted by novelty, this might seem exciting … a shortcut to creating “professional” sounding music without years of practice. But for those of us who are deeply passionate about music, it raises some profound existential questions.
When you play an instrument, you engage in something deeply human. Each musician carries their life experiences into their playing. The pain of heartbreak, the joy of new beginnings, or the struggle to find a voice in an increasingly noisy and artificial online world dominated by algorithms. Sweat, tears, and callouses develop from your efforts and repetition. Your mistakes can lead to new creative vistas and shape the evolution of your style.
Emotions shape the music we create. While an algorithm can only infer and assign a “value” to the vast variety of our experience, it is ruthlessly proficient at analyzing and recording the entire corpus of human existence, and further, cataloging every known human behavioral action and response in mere fractions of a second.
Pardon the Disruption
Technology has always disrupted the music industry. The invention of musical notation provided unprecedented access to compositions. The advent of records allowed performances of music to be captured and shared. When radio brought music into every home, there was fear that no one would buy records. Television added visual spectacle, sparking fears that it would kill live performance. MIDI revolutionized music production but raised concerns about replacing human players. The internet, paired with the MP3 format, democratized music distribution, shattered traditional revenue models, and shifted power from labels to artists. Each of these innovations was met with resistance and uncertainty, but ultimately, they expanded the ways music could be created, shared, and experienced.
Every revolution in art and technology forces us to rediscover what is uniquely human about creativity. To me, though, this is different. AI isn’t a tool that requires a significant amount of human input in order to work. It’s already analyzed the minutia of all of humanity’s greatest creations—from the most esoteric to the ubiquitous, and it is wholly capable of creating entire works of art that are as commercially competitive as anything you’ve ever heard. This will force us to recalibrate our definition of art and push us to dig deeper into our personal truths.
“In an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener can’t tell the difference?”
Advantage: Humans
What if we don’t want to, though? In an age where performed perfection is casually synthesized into existence, does our human expression still hold value? Especially if the average listener can’t tell the difference?
Of course, the answer is still emphatically “Yes!” But caveat emptor. I believe that the value of the tool depends entirely on the way in which it is used—and this one in particular is a very, very powerful tool. We all need to read the manual and handle with care.
AI cannot replicate the experience of creating music in the moment. It cannot capture the energy of a living room jam session with friends or the adrenaline of playing a less-than-perfect set in front of a crowd who cheers because they feel your passion. It cannot replace the personal journey you take each time you push through frustration to master a riff that once seemed impossible. So, my fellow musicians, I say this: Your music is valid. Your guitar is valid. What you create with your hands and heart will always stand apart from what an algorithm can generate.
Our audience, on the other hand, is quite a different matter. And that’s the subject for next month’s Dojo. Until then, namaste.
Our columnist’s bass, built by Anders Mattisson.
Would your instrumental preconceptions hold up if you don a blindfold and take them for a test drive?
I used to think that stereotypes and preconceived notions about what is right and wrong when it comes to bass were things that other people dealt with—not me. I was past all that. Unfazed by opinion, immune to classification. Or so I thought, tucked away in my jazz-hermit-like existence.
That belief was shattered the day Ian Martin Allison handed me a Fender Coronado while I was blindfolded in his basement. (Don’t ask—it’s a long story and an even longer YouTube video if you have time to kill.) For years, I had been a single-cut, 5-string, high-C-string player. That was my world. So, you can imagine my shock when I connected almost instantly with something that felt like it was orbiting a different solar system.
Less than 5 minutes with the instrument, and it was all over. The bass stayed in Ian’s basement. (I did not.) I returned home to Los Angeles, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I kept playing my beloved semi-chambered single-cut 5-string, but I sent its builder, Anders Mattisson, a message about my recent discovery. I asked if there was any way we could create something with the essence of a Coronado while still suiting my playing and my music.
That’s when everything I thought I knew about bass—and the personal boundaries I had set for myself—came crashing down.
When we started talking about building a bass with a fully chambered body, much like the Coronado, I was adamant about two things: It needed to have active electronics, and I would never play a headless bass.
Fast-forward three months to the winterNAMM show in California. Anders arrived for dinner at my house, along with a group of incredible bass players, includingHenrik Linder. I was literally in a chef’s apron, trying to get course after course of food on the table, when Henrik said, “Hey, let’s bring the new bass in.”
He came down the stairs carrying something that looked suspiciously like a guitar case—not a bass case. I figured there had been some kind of mistake or maybe even a prank. When I finally got a break from the chaos in the kitchen, I sat down with the new bass for the first time. And, of course, it was both headless and passive.
I should mention that even though I had made my requests clear—no headless bass, active electronics—I had also told Anders that I trusted him completely. And I’m so glad I did. He disintegrated my assumptions about what a bass “has to” or “should” be, and in doing so, changed my life as a musician in an instant. The weight reduction from the fully chambered body made it essential for the instrument to be headless to maintain perfect balance. And the passive nature of the pickups gave me the most honest representation of my sound that I’ve ever heard in over 30 years of playing bass.
I’m 46 years old. It took me this long to let go of certain fundamental beliefs about my instrument and allow them to evolve naturally, without interference. Updating my understanding of what works for me as a bass player required perspective, whereas some of my most deeply held beliefs about the instrument were based on perception. I don’t want to disregard my experiences or instincts, but I do want to make sure I’m always open to the bigger picture—to other people’s insights and expertise.
Trusting my bass builder’s vision opened musical doors that would have otherwise stayed bolted shut for years to come. The more I improve my awareness of where the line between perception and perspective falls, the more I can apply it to all aspects of my world of bass.
Maybe this month, it’s playing an instrument I never would have previously considered. Next month, it might be incorporating MIDI into my pedalboard, or transcribing bass lines from spaghetti Westerns.
No matter what challenges or evolutions I take on in my music and bass playing, I want to remain open—open to change, open to new ideas, and open to being proven wrong. Because sometimes, the instrument you never thought you’d play ends up being the one that changes everything.