who or what influenced your playing throughout your life?

Playing:
Bass- Thrill Kill Kult(Levi Levi), Chrono Trigger, Eberhard Weber, Eastern European music, Swing, Dub Reggae.

Guitar- Rikk Agnew, John McGeoch, Steve Bartek, Bill Steer, Agata(Melt Banana), Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Eastern European Music, Irish folk music, Mr Bungle, free jazz.

My MUSIC is where my playing is directed and used:
SaILo: Melt Banana, early punk music, spoken word poetry with jazz accompaniment, Big Black, Lounge Jazz, 'Big Rock.'

Butch Vigg and the Compressors: Big Black, Shellac, Early CA hardcore, STNNNG.

Warm [Ph]{F}ilters: Throbbing Gristle, John Zorn, late 1960's MN Folk Music, Michael Barney films, Violet Violence Violently Orange, Goblin.

In progress projects:

Seeeecret...

Keith Moon briefly made me think that playing all over the kit was cool, but Bonham quickly schooled me that it was better to just play awesome kick/tom/hi-hat beats.

Ringo made me want to come up with "catchy" fills.

Max Roach made me want to tune my drums really nicely and think of the kit as a "musical instrument"

Ralph Molina made me realize that if you can't make a simple, slow "boom - pop - boom boom pop" sound really good you ain't shit.

http://www.kuzbass.ru/~psb/west2.jpg

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/26929619/Cliff+Burton+Cliffiecliff2.jpg

duhhhh

what kinda badass are u

i love u

rip

to answer thread:

i started out playing bass when i was 14, and i think i taught myself by playing along to nirvana albums. in retrospect i should have set my sights higher. although i did try and learn "orion". i stopped fucking with it for soem time when i "found" my dad's old fender mustang and then started trying to play indie (i may have been cooler when i was 14 than when i was 17, idk). all guitar songs i play try to sound like MBV or sonic youth or no wave-y or 'electric counterpoint' at some point. feel like ive reached a creative cul de sac in that respect.

Pete Townshend and John Entwistle and Keith Moon influenced my rhythm and Sterling Morrison influenced my strum.

60% dean wareham, 25% david gavurin, 15% lindsey buckingham

It's funny, listening to The Sundays (for polling purposes) has made me realise just how much - first totally deliberately and consciously - and later almost entirely unconsciously - my singing style has been completely influenced by Harriet Wheeler. It's not particularly my natural singing voice at all, but years of affecting that style throughout the early 90s has made me deliberately sing in that style without really thinking about it.

(And I've got my hair in a fucking bun and I'm wearing a cardigan, no less, Jaysus.)

I got a pretty late start playing. Art and graphic design were my thing back in the day and then round about the same time my computer broke and I flunked out of college. My ocd needs an outlet at all times so I asked my dad if I could fix his guitar that had sat around broken since I was a kid and use it to teach myself. I had a lot of catch-up to play and I figured the best way to accelerate from rudimentary to still-rudimentary-but-kinda-faking-otherwise was to listen to Fun House every day and just try and play along, which I think worked ok. Influences come and go I guess, um. Recently I tuned to G cuz I wanted to learn a Stones song and my guitar just stayed there; occasionally I tune back to standard but every time I just find myself thinking "this doesn't make any sense" and just going right back to G. Biggest influences on my playing lately seem to Fred "Sonic" Smith and Waylon Jennings, though I tend mostly to just explore my guitar on my own with certain influences and ideas in the back of my mind. I'm usually not much for learning songs and stuff though I think I could benefit from a little more actual discipline.

It's funny, listening to The Sundays (for polling purposes) has made me realise just how much - first totally deliberately and consciously - and later almost entirely unconsciously - my singing style has been completely influenced by Harriet Wheeler. It's not particularly my natural singing voice at all, but years of affecting that style throughout the early 90s has made me deliberately sing in that style without really thinking about it.

(And I've got my hair in a fucking bun and I'm wearing a cardigan, no less, Jaysus.)

― I Like Daydreams, I've Had Enough Reality (Masonic Boom), Monday, September 28, 2009 12:24 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Ha, it really is funny how this works. I had this Strat that I was using as a tinker project, and although I was mostly playing with pickups of pickups and bridge types and stuff there were cosmetic bits done along the way and eventually I realized I was subconsciously trying to make Ron Asheton's guitar! Guh.

Um, pickups of

in chronological order roughly

The Clash
Joy Division
Wire
Nurse With Wound
Disco Inferno
Nurse With Wound

Pretty much this man, as cliched as that might be, but that kind of thing doesn't matter when you are 18.

http://www.hootpage.com/watt85a.jpg

mccartney had the biggest instrument in the beatles. i noted it.

this has been stuck in my mind for days now, alternately confusing and impressing me. are we talking about his Rickenbacker bass?

I keep imagining Roxy as a gifted, lateral-thinking child looking at footage of the early Beatles and somehow noting that Paul's Hofner, while in most ways visually smaller than those Rickenbackers and Gretsches, was slightly longer

from 15 onward

albert king
monte montgomery
dookie
clash s/t
j mascis
andy gill
the boss

pretty much wanting to be able to play fast strummy parts like dude from boyracer and chisel-era ted leo combined with being able to solo like andy cohen from silkworm and (if i'm being honest with myself) billy corgan

i'm decent at fast strumming, still can't solo worth shit

it was obviously longer tbh! look at the pics from sullivan era

that's true. I guess also in b&w the large bodies of the Rick and Gretsch get lost against the suits anyway.

eno, Nick Rhodes, Jerry Dammers, Edgard Varese, velvet underground, my piano teacher Erna Gostavic (sic?) - not necessarily simultaneously

edgard varese :D

60% dean wareham, 25% david gavurin, 15% lindsey buckingham

Mmm. If only more musicians observed that golden ratio, the world would be a happier place.

For my part, I would say 40% Ralf Hütter, 30% Steve Kilbey, 20% Jimi Hendrix and 10% Dean Wareham.

I was too clumsy and uncoordinated to really have a knack for playing "properly" so what I really responded to were musicians who used a guitar or keyboard as controller device for some mysterious Sound Generating Other. That bit in Live At Pompeii where Gilmour is making spaceship noises with the guitar in his lap with effect pedals everywhere is still massively influential as is Edge's basic 3/16 delay->reverb sound on the first three U2 albums. Unconsciously, I realized that the Strat I play now looks suspiciously like the one they both play.

Sometime in the very early 80s I saw Wall Of Voodoo and it looked like they were playing a truckload of weird garbage dumped on stage. I also saw Black Flag a couple of times around then and was knocked out by Greg Ginn's odd angular playing (with no effects!) and recalculated. I was playing bass around then (it was easier to get into a band as a bassist) and yeah, Watt influenced every punk bass player in LA, but honestly I preferred Kira more (she doesn't get nearly as much credit as she should).

For recording/producing, I'm split 50/50 between Jimmy Page and Mitch Easter.

i stole a quarter inch cable from mitch easter

Thinking about it more, I think the riffs from "Hang on Sloopy", "Wipe Out", and "Summer Lovin' (Grease)" got me started.

Trying to play along to Jimmy Page solos on the radio took me to the next level.

Reading about Ornette Coleman made me believe I could get by without knowing what I was doing.

time to start from scratch again.

That bit in Live At Pompeii where Gilmour is making spaceship noises with the guitar in his lap with effect pedals everywhere is still massively influential

Ah yeah, me too. For the first band I was ever asked to join (this was just a few months after picking up a guitar), I think Live At Pompeii was always invisibly in everybody's minds in spite of having nothing to do with what we had been going for. For a number of reasons, not the least of which being that all but one of us could not properly play a thing, we could never write songs, so we'd just show up to shows with this idea like, "um, ok, let's just try to sound exactly like Pussy Galore", which always just degenerated into us making these weird walls of feedback and tape/synth noise at some point into the set (the cue often being whenever the singer would decide to leave). That bit from Live At Pompeii was exactly the reference point in the back of my head when I'd sprawl out on the floor with my guitar. At the time, though, I couldn't really afford pedals, so in lieu of those I'd just dismantle the thing and try to find ways to force weird rattles and squeals out of it... turning it into a "Sound Producing Other" is a good way of putting it.

I don't know if I could properly explain the whole of it, but being in that band was a very weird experience. Also, there was another strictly avant-garde thing I played with off and on then as well, and I think it was at least three years before I ever got much of a positive reaction from a crowd, it all feels like sort of a strange to begin in music. Maybe it's not, I dunno.

I was reading Guy Pratt's memoir (Pink Floyd's touring bass player throughout the 80's & 90's) and he tells a story aboout how the band had rehearsed Echoes but ditched it only a few gigs into the tour after becoming unstuck too often in the big swooshy mid-section. Problems like a lack of tempo markers was cited.

Gilmour apparently said to Pratt at the time, 'The trouble with young musicians, is they just don't know how to disintegrate.'

It should also be note dthat this was the eighties, sans Waters touring band.

JOHNNY THUNDERS