Music
Lost in bass: Greg Yancey and the 4-string revolution
By Margaret MyrickOct. 6, 2005
There are those who play bass, and those who live by the bass. And there are those whose musical discipline and creativity overcome a nasty little truism about bass guitar players.
"The stereotype of the really stupid stoner musician bothers me a lot," says Greg Yancey from a small workspace behind his house in North Austin, where he designs and creates basses.
An electrical engineer at Spansion, the flash-memory subsidiary of AMD, the 26-year-old bass virtuoso has built 15 of the long-necked instruments and sells them for approximately $2,000 a piece.
"Some people will buy a neck and buy a body and say they made a bass," Yancey says. But he enjoys the challenge of building from scratch — from the smell of freshly cut walnut to winding wires into pickups.
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Photo by Ralph Barrera/AA-S
For Greg Yancey, an electrical engineer by day, real life's all about the bass line. He makes custom basses, and this is his favorite, made of hollowed spalted maple. |
Its owner, John Files, who has played bass for 40 years, opened it after being frustrated by the limited selection at guitar stores. The store's Web site, which Files maintains, fuels much of his business and makes a strong presence in the international bass community. The German bass builder Jens Ritter makes fewer than 50 instruments a year. He sends about 10 of those to Files' store.
Because of their musical roles, bass players, whom Yancey calls the "unsung heroes of the music world," often surrender the spotlight to bandmates. Offstage, they can be quite active and accommodating.
"You have to have a certain humility and lack of ego to pick up a bass in the first place," says Paul Determan, who runs Talkbass.com, one of the original online forums for bass discussion. "If this was a guitar site, I think it would be harder to run," Determan says.
Determan plays for the Austin Symphony and the Austin Lyric Opera. Both he and Yancey are second-generation musicians who began learning in childhood.
Talkbass began as "a pathetic little home page" in Determan's dorm at the University of Texas, where he majored in music performance. Since 1998, the site has attracted 35,000 registered members internationally. It hosts professional advice forums, a gear picture gallery, gig calendar and tablature.
Also, Determan has turned his hobby into a full-time job. The site pushes out four gigs a day in bandwidth, requires 30 to 40 moderators and costs several thousand dollars a year to maintain, which he earns back from donations, merchandise and ads from establishments such as Bass Emporium.
Interacting seems to be part of a bassist's personality. After all, their musical role is to connect the rhythm (percussion) and melody (guitar and vocals) of the song. "Most of the bass players that I know are people who like to communicate with people," Files says. "They like to be involved in things and stay pretty busy."
Yancey is almost done with his 16th bass. It's a five-string with a fretboard of purple heart — a naturally purple wood — and a body of alder, myrtle and maple. "I think I'm going to keep this one," he says. "It's just too cool."
Among his other homemade gadgets is a 5-foot Tesla coil in his bass-making shed that shoots out two feet of menacing lightning. During a demonstration, wearing his industrial-strength earplugs, he zaps a nearby guitar stand-cum-lightning rod, looking a little like a mad scientist in the process. "As a young teenager I made a remote-controlled snake electrocution device," he says. "My old neighbor had me dispose of her snakes."
Now he's over wanting to electrocute things.
"Becoming good at music is not something that's easy, necessarily," Yancey says. "It requires work, dedication, patience, practice. All the things you need to do to be successful at anything are also present in music.
"Someone wants me to make a bass in the shape of a peanut complete with the thatching that goes on the side," Yancey says. "It's actually not that unreasonably shaped, because it's got the waist in the middle. It's just I never wanted to be known as the guy who made the bass that looked like a peanut.
"Then someone else wanted me to make them a bass that was a double-neck five-string — one fretted, one fretless — all out of this wood called wenge, and it would have weighed like 35 pounds. I didn't want to be responsible for his chiropractic bills."
To avoid too many requests, Yancey doesn't advertise. He's still a one-man operation with a day job.
"My goal is to someday become self-sustainable financially with this and still have time to eat, live and hang out," he says. "And not be an automated human robot bass-builder guy."
