why are there so many women bassplayers?

Anyway, I once heard an explanation from a friend of mine: "it just feels good".

In closing, Kim Deal.

"And the louder you cheer, guys, the hotter she gets."
--Tommy Walters of Abandoned Pools, on his bass player Leah Randi

Hmmmmmm....

Also: Miki and Emma of Lush. More Rickenbacker goodness there, also.

So what about women playing drums?

(also larger strings = HARDER to play duh)

Now I think that there are fewer women who look wrong with a guitar than there are men. (The reason for this, I think, is that fewer ugly women than ugly men get to play guitar in public - which is fucked up, but a different topic.)

Some people don't look so cool playing guitar, that's true. Men get away with not looking so cool. Women, with every element of their appearance being graded by fuckwits, sometimes have a harder time getting away with not looking cool.

The name that genuinely comes to mind when I try to think of someone who looks RIGHT playing guitar: PJ Harvey

The name that genuinely comes to mind when I try to think of a MAN who looks RIGHT playing guitar: Elvis Presley

The name that genuinely comes to mind when I try to think of someone who looks WRONG playing guitar: John Lennon

But, specifically on the "women in bands" topic, one reason that, to me, is blazingly obvious hasn't been advanced yet: a lot of bands specifically seek out female lead or harmony vocals as a sound they want, but can't afford to support a large roster, so the female vocalist takes up bass as the easiest instrument to learn and/or the easiest instrument to play while singing (which is debatable, but I'd argue it's true at the beginner level, at least). I've had more than one indie woman bassist basically say as much to me -- "I joined the band as a singer, and then I took up bass". It sounds like an inauspicious way to take up an instrument, but it's been the genesis of some great bass work. I'm not sure that this doesn't happen just as often with male counterparts, but that hinges on the question of whether "female rock musicians willing to fully commit to a band" are believed to be a rarer commodity than fully committed male rock musicians, and that's not a question I'm well-equipped to answer.

I can't think of too many woman upright bassists, either. Nedra Wheeler's the only one that comes to mind.

"There are lots of other fun instruments...like bass!"

*twannnng.....
twannnnnnng......*

I play both notes and chords on the bass, and seeing as you can incorporate hammer-ons, pull offs, and lots of other little things, it all becomes pretty complicated.

I will agree though that bass is easier to learn right off the bat and you dont have to get any better then playing one note at a time if you dont.

In closing, Kim Gordon.

Hey Minna what band was that?

Sea Scouts, yo.

It is easier to be a shite bassist than it is to be a good guitarist, sure. However, just because a lot of bass players picked it up because they couldn't play anything and just learned to play root notes doesn't mean it is an easier instrument. not to mention the fact that anyone can play chords on a guitar but not everyone can drop a fat walking bass line.

I must admit that I started playing bass because I can't pick for shit, which makes guitar a pain if you want to play anything but chords. I pluck the strings rather than pick. On the other hand, you can't slap on guitar (or can you?)

The fact is, though, female bass players are hot--e.g. toko yasuda, michelle mae, rachel goswell (rrrrrr), et al.

slap guitar would involve playing with your hands instead of a pic, which most people don't do on electric.

pH34r the bass player from erase errata. she are awesome. then again, so is everybody in that band.

::shakes head, speechless::

Anyway, erm, funny you should mention this. Fiona talks about this in the current issue of Careless Talk.

Girls on bass? Two words: CAROLE KING. This is why girls play bass.

I look less stupid holding a guitar than my future husband, that is for sure.

I can say no more on this thread, I will just start ranting.

does anyone have a credible answer to my question? I'm particularly asking any women bassists on the board why they think they ended up playing that rather than any other instrument.

are there are really that many women bass players or is that there are a few very prominent ones.

And then the girl discovers that the bass really is the glue that holds music all together, it is the most vital instrument in terms of groove, or SOUL or whatever it is that makes music MOVE, and then they are hooked on the power. It's not a flashy instrument. It is very easy to play, but very difficult to MASTER.

You get a few girls out there playing bass, from Carole Kaye to Kim Gordon and Tina Weymouth and Kim Deal, and suddenly, it's Role Model Syndrome, and girls want to play bass, because that's the role they see themselves assigned to, and it snowballs.

I don't play bass any more, but it's still the instrument I have the most love for. Because it is the glue, because it is the instrument that holds everything else together.

As for Tina Weymouth, she's almost the antithesis - persuaded reluctantly by her boyfriend and his mate to learn a couple of set pieces and stand in for them just until they could recruit a "proper" bass player.

Oh and to put my penn'orth in on another part of this topic, bass is a relatively easy instrument to bluff your way in but a relatively difficult one to truly excel at.

*raises hand*

Then again, I sang bass at the time so it really wasn't that outlandish. Also, it was listening to AT40 rather than watching Top Of The Pops, but that's just a detail.

There are not proportionally more female bass players than male bass players. I believe:
male guitar players > male bass players > male drummers
and
female guitar players > female bass players > female drummers
and of course there are less females than males in each category, but proportionally, these numbers would match up. I think the disparity is that there are more female bass players in otherwise-all-male bands than female guitarists or drummers in otherwise-all-male bands. This probably has more to do with male sexism than anything else ("Stick the chick on bass, she's hottt and will attract an audience but bass is easy, plus the vibrations turn them on" - see above asinine threads).

So I've just disproved my own point. Or maybe proved it, cause of the Role Model Effect. Dunno...

I watched TOTP as a kid and wanted to be a girl.

I also find women who want to be in bands are (on average) significantly more musically talented than guys who want to be in bands. I suspect it's because generally women are less motivated by non-musical aspects - like being cool/cameraderie/chance to impress the opposite sex - than guys. They are more likely to be motivated by being deeply into music and/or feeling they have a talent for it.

OK, broad generalisations, but put these two things together and you get one explanation why there seem to be a disproportionate amount of female bass players.

That's one big load of BS.

(arfarf comments made me do it, so don't blame me).

I personally know two male guitarists who taught their wives the rudiments of bass so they (the wives) could join the guys' bands. In one case the wife is now the only songwriter.

Possibly so, but if you want to reduce this to mathematical equations, surely the suggestion that is being made is that:
(female bass players / female musicians) > (male bass players / male musicians)?

Yes, OK, I admit it, I'm an accountant

Cause, what she said.

TMFTML

As you will see, it takes incredibly strong finger muscles to keep this up for any length of time - especially for long, extended disco tracks. (I suspect that this is why so many disco basslines alternate the octave hopping with a more funk-derived box pattern of 4ths, 5ths and 7ths - simply for pinkie-relief!)

DAMN YOU CARPAL TUNNEL

I'll give it a try when I get home to my bass.

Would you reccomend a pick or two right hand fingers or a kinda thumb and finger claw?

I guess disco doers use fingers but my nails always get in the way no matter how short I cut them. Damn Simpsons fingers.

I've never heard of felt picks before, I'll have to try them.

(I won't make the obligatory backstage joke about handjobs. But I thought about it.)

Felt picks rock.

(To my tired eyes that looks less like a sentance and more like three arbitrary words that don't quite belong together.)

Coffee is in order.

As for me, I didn't know what a bass guitar was until the 9th grade! It's true! I was a very unaware child.

I think the phenomena of bass playin' wymynz has got to do somewhat with sexist perceptions, knowhattamean? Think about it. The guitar is stereotyped as an exerting of the male's phallic authority, (WANK! women who play guitar might seem butch, ex: Lita Ford) while the bass, if played by a woman, is viewed as overblown phallus, purveyor of empowerment and instrument of joy. The female becomes the instigat-ah acting upon a grotesque and disconcerting one eyed beast which must be tamed (SPANK!) with fury. Just check out that crazy bodacious bass babes website that was posted further above. The double entendres abound, people!

http://www.vintagebass.com/thedudepit/showthread.php?t=8871&page=1&pp=10

And those mascu-skanks just wanna play bass.

You're truly enlightened, Neil, but how then do you explain waif mole-girl D'arcy.

...and avoiding any discussion of the music - Sheryl Crow looks pretty damn right playing bass or guitar.

Heh heh... that's actually true !

Well, I wrote a paper on this once, and I won't say that it couldn't have been better (you know, with like a grant and a research assistant or what have you)....but I ended up putting together a few IMO decent approaches to this:

1. It may well be a myth, since there are shockingly few large, statistically robust studies concerning membership in bands and who plays what. But once the notion gets around that there are a lot of "chick bassists," you start seeing every woman playing bass as proof for the theory, and overlook women that aren't playing bass and bassists that aren't women.

2. The more complicated answer: it has to do with the way in which you learn the skills of being in a band. This draws from two articles by Mary Ann Clawson entitled, helpfully, "When Women Play The Bass: Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music" and "Masculinity and Skill Acquisition in the Adolescent Rock Band." By combining Clawson's observations and research in the two articles, you can come up with something like this: the way you learn to be in rock bands is by being in rock bands; boys are much more likely to be encouraged (by parents, friends, pop culture) to be in shitty, ridiculous bands at age 13; girls discovering they want to be in bands at age 19, 20, 21, 30, need to be in bands to acquire the skills; therefore, they need something they can pick up and do decently pretty quickly. As it so happens, within punk-influenced genres (ie, alternative, indie), there is a general anti-virtuousity ethic that seems particularly realized in bass, making it the "easy to learn, hard to master" instrument of the genre.

Friends of mine who weren't really into indie/punk-derived music have never heard of the girl bassist stereotype - in fact, when I would tell them about the paper, they had the idea completely backwards, and assumed I was writing some sort of expose on why there weren't any female bassists. When I presented this paper I played samples of "Sliver" by Nirvana in contrast with a Phish live track (can't recall which) to show the different roles of bass in the different genres; finished with "Monkey Gone To Heaven," which inspired a non-musician woman in the audience to assert, "I could play that!"

My main problem with some of the other answers in this thread, aside from the ones that are just blatantly sexist and dumb, is that they locate the decision-making in the rest of the band, ie, "oh, us dudes tend to put the girl on bass because..." rather than on the woman playing bass and why she would choose that instrument. I've heard some more essentialist explanations from women, claiming some sort of primal, elemental womanly connection with the instrument's deep sounds etc., but I think the whole idea of wanting to be in a band, playing this rock n' roll music that means so much to us all, and having to find a way to do that, has more resonance (no pun intended). Maybe it's because I myself learned my instrument (keyboard) in the high school classroom and have thus never really felt comfortable when people want me to play with them - I just don't really know what's involved in playing with people. Maybe I should take up the damn bass...

Heavy Bottom.

One could be all like "Womyn b havin' too long o' fingernails to be guitar frettin' - but I just spent the pre-drunk portion of NYE being wowed by one Banjo Betsy, who single-handedly laid to waste all gender-biased fretting assumptions I might have had, but didn't really have to begin with.

My friend & I developed a hypothesis that a necessary & sufficient condition for a band to be 'good' was that the bass player was either a woman or the tallest member.

It was proved right by a lot of the bands we liked at the time:

Nirvana - tallest member
Smashing Pumpkins - woman
Pixies - woman
Urusei Yatsura - woman
Manic Street Preachers - tallest member
Mogwai - tallest member (taking Dominic as the most common bass handler)

Obviously there are cases where it falls down, but I still stand by it as a good rule of thumb. There's definitely a strong correlation between band quality and the bass player being a woman or the tallest member.

Where does this theory leave Van Halen?

Hmm. I haven't found a photo of Tony Levin in which he's shorter than any bandmate (King Crimson, Peter Gabriel's backing band) or member of a great band he sessions for: John Lennon, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Sarah McLachlan, The Roches, Todd Rundgren, Paul Simon , Gary Burton, James Taylor, Herbie Mann, Carly Simon. Score one more for the tallest member or the one with the most X chromosomes.

http://www.discogs.com/image/R-1344680-1213356289.jpeg

Where does this theory leave Van Halen?

Still in the bass-is-least-competitive-roster-spot scenario. MA was hired for his backing vox, scuttlebutt has it that Eddie played a good chunk of the boomstick bits on record.

It's good how after this fractious thread Dr Casino comes along and reports on some actual RESEARCH that he actually did off his own bat. I was impressed.

Haha, thanks, all I did was read a few articles and bang some ideas together though! Undergrad days! Anyway it turns out that when I actually read the whole thread, lucylurex beat me to the Clawson cite by several years, posting-time.

Hooky not tall.
http://991.com/newGallery/Joy-Division-Maximum-Joy-Divis-389011.jpg

obviously because they can't play a proper 7 string guitar.

There are so many female bass players because females are becoming masculinized.They are getting hairy lips, sideburns, broad shoulders, thick chunky calves, big feet, big hands, deeper voices,
skanky bitch asses, darker and darker hair, thick bushy eyebrows,
facial hair, more burping and farting, more aggressive mannerisms.There must be too much testosterone in them
pre-birth, and it's a genetic tendency.Some doctors are even prescribing females testosterone, which only makes them become
dark, hairy skanky-bitch butch-lezbos.

And those mascu-skanks just wanna play bass.

― Neil Armstrong, Thursday, 2 March 2006 11:35 (2 years ago)

i have noticed this trend as well. "mascu-skank" is my new buzzword for 2009.

suggest ban

I play the guy-tar cuz I'm a closet lesbian

lol @ Neil Armstrong