My Own Music Journey Part4

Wasn't long before two of the guys and I decided that what we really should do is to reform the band and try with our ideas. This time, we had help from a friend of Pablo, the lead guitarist. His friend was a kin guitar player too, so that throw me out of playing the guitar, and seeing that it was very hard to get a decent bass player I decided to change my instrument and aspirations and use my guitar knowledge and techniques in to playing the bass and try to be a less ordinary bass player, and by then I realized that me being the lead singer wasn't the best move, so after auditioning quite a few people we finally found the girl with the right voice... and the right looks, yeah, definitively the right looks, we couldn't agree more... but the important thing was that she did sing great.
My obsession and insistence about getting it right with the bass guitar finally give some positive results, I used to get comments by people after the gigs, and I even got ask "who was my teacher, cos he/she must be awesome"; little they new that I actually learn by my self to play the bass, and listening to people's comments and questions considering what little experience with the instrument I had a the time made me feel really good and got my gears rolling and will for more skill to be even better.
My first bass was a Samick 5 strings through neck, meaning that it had 5 strings instead of 4, making the extra string a fatter and lower note, so instead of having an “E” string as you top string I had a “B” string, looking like “G” as your bottom string, the one that will give you a higher pitch note, followed by a “D”, then up on top you would find the “A” and then the “E” ending on top with a thick “B” string that would give me lower notes, making me sound like an Earthquake if I needed to. This set up is currently used by many bass players, like Fieldy, Korn’s ex-bassist ( who have his own signature bass, the Ibanez K5), or another one who play with an Ibanez, Sam Rivers from Limp Bizkit.
By having an extra string in the neck of a bass guitar I founded that the space between strings was narrower, so for me it was a lot easier to play due to my experience with normal 6 strings guitars. The one think on that Samick that did bother me after a while was that it didn’t had active pickups, and one thing I was getting interested in was “slapping”, and for “bass slapping“ I noticed that I would be better off with a normal 4 string bass with active pickups. Then there came Roberto, my neighbour who turned up to be an experienced bass player and wanted to sale his old trusty Westone Thunder IA and I just happened to have the right money.
It turned out that with this bass I wasn’t so interested in “slapping” but more on the “Clank” chunky sound that I loved in bands like Iron Maiden (Notice that Iron Maiden’s bass player, Steve Harris, was playing with a Fender Precision Bass that sounds and have way more quality than this Westone, and cost ten times more). Because of this I developed a technique that would let me play a note 3 times in a fraction of a second using my fingers instead of a plectrum, inspired by the “Horse galloping” effect that Steve Harris made so popular in the Iron Maiden song “The Trooper”. After some time of playing in the band I started to write songs, and as it is to expect, the bass in this songs was one of the main features, so I used this “Horse galloping” technique in one song and turned to be one of our coolest songs.
Now that I had a pair of bass guitars that where very different from each other and would give me a wide choice of stiles things turned out to go wrong between some of the band members again, being the drum player the main cause of the argument, eventually we split and never got back together because while this was going on with my beloved band my life started to head to the wrong direction, and after doing some really bad wrongs I had to move on and sort of started from scratch in a new place with a new life.

White version of my Westone Thunder IA. Picture taken from "The Westone bass and guitar resource site"