WitH tHree OF tHeM. i’M nOt a COlleCtOr”
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Bassists
lee sklar
043 Bass Guitar MaGazine
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at it, and of course the fi rst thing you notice is the Novax Fanned Fret system. I asked him to explain it to me and it made perfect sense. Open a piano and the low strings are longer than the high strings. It felt great ergonomically and I became a fan. A great deal of my work has been replacing synth bass parts, and because they’re always played in the lower registers, I was always looking for a fi ve-string that read in that register, and the Dingwall read beautifully. I made the Warwick connection at Bass Player Live, also in LA, when I tried out a fretless Starbass II. Steve Bailey is a dear friend and was with Warwick. I was on tour with Lyle Lovett, and Steve came to a show with that fretless bass and said that Hans-Peter Wilfer from Warwick wanted me to have it, which blew me away. Then at the following NAMM show in LA, we connected as though we had known each other for years. I use it almost every day and love it.”
Does Lee have any advice on how to get that elusive studio tone that so many of us strive for? “Every player is individual and there are too many options for a defi nitive answer,” he says. “Every style of music demands something unique; the kind of bass one plays, the strings, the amp, the playing style – thumb and slap,
or pick or fi ngers. Each is a totally different sound.
I’ve always been a fi nger player, I go for a full, rich bass sound, whereas other guys I know use a far more brittle sound. I like a high action, which is great for sustain. I always try, if possible, to have my amp and DI both recorded. I almost never use any outboard gear or pedals, because I feel the bass should be as pure as possible so that everything else tonally can be built from there. Once in a while, I’ll record with an effect if I feel it’s absolutely the right thing for the song – but that’s the exception.”
With such a hectic schedule, Lee remains philosophical and upbeat: he appears grateful to be working as busily as ever. Does he fi nd downtime to chill out and relax away from music? “I get little downtime,” he chuckles. “I love to work in the garden and work on cars, but I’m never at a loss for something to do. I feel so blessed every day that I get to do what I do. A job that would have been my hobby, something positive in people’s lives, the friendships with other players… it’s such a magical thing. I always felt that by this time in my career, I’d be put out to pasture, but I’m as busy as I’ve ever been – so I’ll keep ploughing the fi elds as long as I get calls.”
As he says: “We’ll see what the future holds, but at 19 years old, when this all really got going, it was hard to imagine still doing it at 68. I’ve really been blessed to work with so many wonderful people, and I have always been a fan of so many that I came to know and work with. I wish everyone all the best in this adventure we call the music business. It’s a gift beyond description, and I cherish every second of it. How the hell did I get so lucky? Where the hell did the time go? I usually ask that of the drummer… but that’s another paragraph!”
“eVerY stYle OF MusiC DeManDs sOMetHinG uniQue; tHe kinD OF Bass One PlaYs, tHe strinGs, tHe aMP…”
Bassists
lee sklar
045.indd 45 19/05/2015 15:51
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Y
ou will no doubt have read in this and other magazines about the death of the music industry.Without going too far into the root cause of its decline (or naming any of the record company execs who sat on their fat bonuses and did nothing while the public fi gured out how to rip CDs), let’s just say that by 2000 or thereabouts, the old business model of compact discs being sold for £18.99 at bricks-and-mortar record shops was on its way out.
The process took about fi ve years. Once consumers were equipped with CD-burning software, a broadband internet connection and (crucially) access to a host of fi lesharing websites and programs, it was all over. The winners: people who wanted free music. The losers:
record companies, a host of associated industries and – most unjustly – the musicians who made the music in the fi rst place.
And yet there is hope for musicians, and ironically it’s the internet – the root cause of the problem in the fi rst place – which is offering that hope. Go to support.google.
com and search for Youtube. Pretty soon you’ll come up with a page titled ‘What kind of content can I monetise?’
and there, friends, is your answer. While most of us don’t have the tunes that would attract suffi cient views to make us a fortune, or indeed the skills to create the required accompanying videos, a small number of musos do, and they’re laughing all the way to their nearest custom luthier.
Meet Rob Scallon, a Chicago-based chap with phenomenal abilities on guitar, bass, banjo, and ukulele;
a catalogue of cool original and cover songs; an eye for a witty video; and the perseverance to make those things pay. “I have 260,000 subscribers,” he tells BGM. “To put the business side of it into perspective, when I had 35,000 subscribers I was able to quit my job and go full-time, two years ago. OK, I could only afford to eat ramen noodles at that level: I could just about get by! But the last year has been nuts: I’m gaining maybe 800 or 900 new subscribers a day.”
Yeah, right, I hear you cynical people say – and not without reason. But Scallon isn’t simply earning a couple
of quid on the side here. Although we’re far too polite to ask to see his latest bank statement, the guy is obviously making rather a lot of money.
“People always assume that this is just a hobby,” chuckles Scallon. “They say, ‘So you make Youtube videos?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been doing it for a while’ and then they’ll say, ‘Oh cool, so what do you do for a living?’ My answer is
‘That is what I do for a living!’ There’s a lot of people doing this, and some of them are making millions of dollars.
I’m not making seven fi gures myself, but there’s lots of opportunities. When I started out, a lot of people were just starting to establish themselves, and a lot of those people were doing it for a living then – and now, some of these people are incredibly successful entrepreneurs with huge businesses based on online video.”
So how does it work? Essentially Google, owners of Youtube, pay uploaders of selected videos a certain amount per view per fi lm clip. We don’t need to ask how much this is: in the era of Spotify and other streaming services that pay users a microscopic amount per stream, it won’t be much. But if you have hundreds of thousands of subscribers to your videos, those pennies add up pretty fast.
In Scallon’s case, this income means that he never has to smell a roadie’s socks. “I’ll have a much more stable income making Youtube videos than I would if I was going out gigging,” he explains. “I play live very rarely. All I ever wanted was to make music and to make enough money for a stable living, and I have those things now.”
Watch a few of Scallon’s videos and you’ll see that he uses an impressive number of instruments, in particular as part of his ‘Metal Songs Played On Non-Metal Instruments’
series. Check out his banjo version of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’, System Of A Down’s ‘Chop Suey!’ on cello and a ukulele-driven take on Cannibal Corpse’s ‘Frantic Disembowelment’. “I have a lot of acoustic instruments,”
he tells us. “I have an endorsement with Kala ukuleles, so I have three of those, one of which is a U-Bass.”
“I got really into Primus in middle school,” he says, asked about bass. “Most of my infl uences are bass players. Les Claypool and Victor Wooten moulded me more than any guitar player. I do a lot of slap style on the guitar, which comes from me trying to learn Primus bass parts and move them over to the eight- and nine-string guitars. Me and a