FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Bottleneck Guitar Learn Play

Question:
We, ( that's me myself and I ) play 4 and 6 fretted and fretless bass, EUB, Lap steel , Classical guitar, 5 string steel string guitar ( my own design for my bass lovin' fingers, ) banjo, keys, piano and drums, plus we just started learning Tabla. Ok, and a wee bit of electric guitar. One I omitted. I play Ocarina, and I've got the solo for Wild Thing down cold. Any one for a Troggs tribute?

Answer:
I began music studying piano and I'm sorry to say I still suck major on keys. There was a time when I tried to learn electric guitar too. (hasn't everyone been through that?) I gave up and sold it to a friend. I had a sax once and even fooled around for a while on my high school girl friend's oboe. [Man! Talk about giving you a buzz in the head!] But I've never made much progress on horns. Nobody ever paid me money to hear me play ANY of these instruments! So when it came to gigs demand sort of set the pace. Guitar players a dime a dozen and bass players (especially back then when this bass player owned his own upright!) well, you know. Same thing for drums. Dad was a drummers so by teen rebel rules, I had to learn a different instrument. Which is why I bought a bass. BUT then there are financial rules. Somehow word got out that I could also play drums (and of course there was a drumset for the using if Dad didn't have a gig). So guess what? And over the years you just keep learning and now it's URB, 4,5,6, string fretted/fretless bass and I suppose in a pinch I can even fall back on my piano days and do synth bass (tho I don't own one). And of course now I own almost as many drumsets as basses! These days I'm kinda backed off, don't need the money and can more or less follow my own muse. And I do. So I had this banjo phase (owned the banjo since HS but really only started to truly learn it once the phase hit.) Then there was the hand-drum phase. Got into African djembe and all that scene, and from there got sucked into Latin, congas etc. and all that scene. Oh yeah, played in a Samba group until it broke up. This then means I now can pretty much do percussion so long as it doesn't involve tabla and all that complex Indian stuff (Saving that for a later phase). Then the blues phase hit. Well it's not quite a true phase since I've always had an interest in Blues, but it did get me more serious. So I got a set of cheapo harps and started learning (still not very good) and now the latest phase is Bottleneck guitar. Yeah, I know I failed at guitar before, but with slide tuning it just seems so much more natural to me. I'm making pretty nice progress! I forgot to mention the Theremin I built, which had the intention of a segue into a midi phase which happily so far (except for my e-drum kit) has never developed into a full-fledged phase . It might sound as if my attention is simply wandering in the wilderness, and maybe it is, but the thing I find so interesting is the way one area/instrument ALSO educates you and give support to ALL the other areas and isturments. So much to learn and in the end amazingly it does all fit together in interesting ways.