![\"Christian](\"https:\/\/www.vintageandrare.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/Christian-Houmann.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI have played the bass for the last 15 years. I\u2019m considering myself a musician, which happens to play the bass mostly. I would love to be a singer, but I don\u2019t have a great singing voice so therefore I will leave that to the thousands of those amazing singers around the world. Singers have the ability to carry their instrument along with them always. Those of us who are an instrumentalist need our tools to perform. While singers have their own unique sound and will always have that sound unless they are able to change it. In the search of your sound you\u2019ll have to find an instrument which fits you and have the sound you are looking for.<\/p>\n
As a solo artist I believe you must find your own sound. For example guitar players such as Pat Metheny and Mike Stern. They both play the jazz, rock & fusion but still they have their own sound. So the listener can tell who it is within the first 5 seconds of listening to them. Marcus Miller and Jaco Pastorius both have different sound even though they both are playing a Fender jazz bass. Jaco Pastorius has been dead for almost 30 years, so he is obviously not playing a jazz bass anymore. But every time you hear a fretless jazz bass with bridge pickup on, you think of Jaco.<\/p>\n
Most players care for their instruments and you often get a close relationship to some of your instruments. Your first instrument is sometimes very special. I remember my first bass. I was 12 and hadn\u2019t played bass before. I got a 4 string white Yamaha. It was very cheap but a good instrument. I really don\u2019t know why, but I felt that I needed a 5 string bass to become a better player. So I worked hard that summer and earned the money to get an Ibanez 5 string in a metallic blue color. I listened to Guns\u2019n\u2019Roses before I started to play bass, but then a friend of mine who is a drummer introduced me to Primus and from that day I was one of the biggest Primus fans in Denmark. Les Claypool\u2019s bass play blew me away (Still does). Soon I wanted a bass like Les Claypool\u2019s bass. But at that time there wasn\u2019t that much info on the internet about basses or at least I didn\u2019t know where too look. I found out that he was playing a Carl Thompson bass but that was about it.<\/p>\n
Later I saw a catalog for Warwich basses and I found a bass, which looked a bit like Les Claypool\u2019s main 4 string. It was a Fortress one 4 string and it had that long upper horn which was similar to Les Claypool\u2019s bass. This bass I played for a few years and then I moved on to a Fender Jazz bass. A lot people told me that every bassplayer should have a Fender because it had the same look and sound as always and it wasn\u2019t about to change. It was a sunburst 62\u2019 reissue jazz bass and it had a great Fender sound. It was warm and could fit in to all different kind of music. I became better bassplayer and started being more into solo bass players and tried to learn from them all. Marcus Miller, Stanley Clarke and Victor Wooten were some of my biggest influences. I got the Bassday 98\u2019 with Victor Wooten on VHS and from that day I knew that I wanted a bass like his. That bass was a Fodera. His bass sounded so good. So clear in sound and very very cool looking. He was playing his second version of his Yin & Yang bass. His first Yin & Yang bass was actually a Monarch fretless 4. I believe you can find it on his website. I liked my Fender but the strings where far away from the fingerboard and if I tried to lower the strings I got too much frets noise. It was like playing an upright bass!<\/p>\n