Back to Basics

32 more sleeps until I sing in a choir.

I settled down to practise for the festive sing-song this evening and ended up opening a whole can of worms. I got my music out and stared blankly at it for a few moments. As a tenor, all the parts I'll be required to sing are all written on the bass stave. Despite having played bass in my church's music group for about 6 years I cannot read bass clef. This is a classic example of me 'not quite finishing the job' -This needs remedying.

I own many, many instruments; guitar, glockenspeil, violin, erhu, mandolin, ukelele but the bass guitar was my first foray into the world of music. As a teenager all of my friends were getting electric guitars and starting bands. I reasoned that, as it is a less glamorous instrument, bass players would be in short supply and high demand. All I had to do was learn the bass and I would be the most 'in demand' kid in school.

As it happened there were plenty of good bass players in Year 10 at Glyn Technology; Ben, Lewis, Nathan and Tom being the "Big Four" of four strings. Being the worst bass player at school wasn't really part of the plan so, as a result, the bass guitar got put into a cupboard never to be seen again.

Years later I discovered there was a shortage of bass players in my church's music group. This was a good opportunity to get the bass out of the cupboard and finally be of use to someone. This time the goal wasn't to get good at bass guitar so I could be popular, this time the goal was to serve the Lord by helping his people worship him in song... only I never quite learnt how to read the music.

Our first baffling ordeal is to finish learning how to read music and try to apply it.