Salutations From The Land Of Cows

Over the past few years I’ve been deeply mired in the process of making my acoustic double bass sound great loud by electricity.  It’s a process that has been fun and exasperating.  The irony is that this is a 150 year old double bass that for most of its life has had no trouble expressing itself without electrical assistance.  What I have discovered after spending thousands of dollars and god knows how much time is that nothing electrically created or reinforced sounds better than then my 150 year old double bass acoustically.  It is warm, complex, round, full, and sweet in a way that is sublime and amazing.  The work required to create such a thing in 1860 would have been quite a labor of love.  The fact that it’s still around making music is a testament to its creators long since dead.  Any attempt to make it louder via electric means diminishes it.

The opportunities for me to use that bass in contexts that don’t require electric sound reinforcement are few and far between and frankly these days hardly ever attended by people spending their daily bread.  While I search for them their absence is profound to me. 

Modern expectations of volume and crowd coverage require electricity and frankly I think we are not better off for it.  They say volume allows for nuance where acoustic performance sacrifices nuance for power.  Bing Crosby vs. Pavarotti.  Perhaps, but Pavarotti was full of dynamic range in a way that Bing, although beautiful, could never match. I think maybe the listener has gotten lazy. I would suggest that it’s the listener that has been beaten up by electric volume rather than the performer enhanced by it.

 
Our attempts to make this beautiful natural sound loud to compete with subwoofers and THX certified surround sound have diminished its richness.  While we are not to be faulted for it, the music listener is surely shortchanged from it.  Over the last 80 years as the modern hi-fi arose from the ashes of the Victor Talking Machine, the last true acoustic sound reproducer, we have become more and more subject to the demands of electric sound reinforcement.  True acoustic performance has less value as listeners loose their patience for it and frankly don’t have the hearing for it anymore.  This is evolution.  Technology is developed to help us experience music performance without having to actually go to it and also help us hear it when it’s hard to while we are there.  Then that same technology develops a life of its own.  People start using the technology to make the music.  Hence the rise of the electric guitar, then the electric bass; pretty soon you’ve got rock bands in stadiums with PA’s that can be heard with clarity from miles away.

My Grandmother used to bitch about how loud everything was.  She loved to go to the Met in New York, and small clubs to experience acoustic music in all its forms during her time there through the first half of the 20^th Century.  When she moved out to Ohio to spend her last years with her son and us pesky grandkids, she couldn’t come to my rock band performances.  To much noise, she said.  She loved us and wanted to see what we were doing but I know now the electric sound was too much for her.  Her ear was trained to listen for the subtleties and beauty of acoustic performance and the electric pounding was so offensive to that training it caused her more pain than the joy of seeing her grandbabies do something special.

I now understand that.  After decades of classic rock that were the mainstay of my teens, twenties and thirties, when experiencing music as a listener I find myself more and more eschewing electric performance for acoustic.  Symphonic, chamber, small combo jazz with no electrics have replaced the barrage of electric guitars and drums that I’ve spent my life studying.  I sold my huge Ampeg SVT bass amps for a 150 year old double bass.  Why?  Because electricity is killing my hearing and I now realize some of the spirit of music too.  I think my grandmother had it right.

The folly is as a professional musician I spend scads of money and time and energy converting that beautiful old instrument’s sound into electricity to keep up with the demands of the people coming to hear me perform.  I reduce this glorious old box to 600 watts and a handful of small speakers so it’s loud as hell but sounds like shit.  As I sit in the bar and warm up acoustically I inevitably get people coming up saying things like “my god that thing sounds beautiful”.  After the show the comments are “you rock”.

The next great technological advancement is happening in music with the computer and the internet.  It has removed acoustic sound creation entirely and is in the process of changing the way music is distributed, marketed, heard and experienced.  Progress marches forward and for the first time in my life I can’t keep up anymore.

All the while my old bass sits there watching I think.  When it started playing there were no computers, no cars, no phones, no electricity, no Bing Crosby not even my grandmother.  When it made music the performer had to carry it to the performance space and everyone who came to hear had to travel to do so.  The first devices for recording sound had just started to be conceived.  It was already 60 years old by the time electric recordings started being made and modern sound reinforcement had it’s beginnings in the military during the First World War.  By the time the Beatles played Shea stadium and nobody could hear it that old bass was over 100 years old.

I wish it could talk.

Maybe it is and that’s why I felt compelled to write this.