Give him the sheet music to read.

I'm allowed to make that joke, because I can't read sheet music (well, not anywhere near what I'd call proficiently), and, as of Saturday, I'm going to call myself a bass player again.

For my recent birthday, Amy bought me a cleaning kit and some new strings for my bass, which, I'm ashamed to say, has been sat in it's case in various cupboards for roughly the last thirteen or fourteen years. Not any more though.

I used the neck cleaner from the cleaning kit, and turned the neck into something resembling rosewood with small strips of metal in it, rather than something caked in black, sticky, 'orribleness. I removed and threw away the old, rusty bit of metal, and connected up the shiny new strings (which is so much easier with double ball ends than the "normal" single ball end strings - headless FTW :) ), and plucked some strings as if I knew what I was doing.

I need to do a little set-up work to take the buzz out of the strings, and a damn sight more playing, to try and knock some of the brightness out of the strings, but an hour after getting it re-strung and tuned, thanks to a quick search on youtube, I was knocking out a passable, but definitely not performable, version of Michael Jackson's Beat It.

Now I just need to wait for my iRig to arrive so I can use my iphone as a practice amp.

 

How do you get a bass player to go away from your front door?

He'll leave just as soon as you pay for the pizzas ;-)