Be Honest… Be Yourself! By Igor Saavedra

Hi my friends…. as I write this, it is 7am… my eyes wide open in my hotel room, not being able to sleep too much perhaps because of the excess of endorphins circulating in my body after sharing an amazing and exciting musical experience at the London Bass Guitar Show 2013!

While performing and getting all the wonderful feedback from the British audience, a little idea (that BTW cost me a wrong note ha-ha) came into my mind, so I “stored” it in order to be able to develop it ASAP in the form of a new article for you guys… so here I am in my bed typing on my iPhone.

It’s amazing how many awesome bass players are spread all over the world; I have the opportunity to see them often, in all the bass shows I’ve been able to participate… but have you asked why so many do not really succeed? In fact, if you analyze this issue carefully, you’ll see that the success pyramid is crudely unforgiving.

The core of the analysis, in my humble opinion, has to be focused on that very special moment when a musician is aware that they have already achieved a really good level of professionalism and proficiency on relevant musical aspects, like technique and musical theory knowledge, and still sees that nothing really successful is happening with his/her career… and to be honest, on most occasions will never “happen”.

So, what’s missing????

Based on my experience, which is just “my experience” and it’s not proposed as any dogma or any official truth, the most difficult aspect to achieve as a musician is not being awesomely good and skilled but “Being unique and original”. Don’t come to the conclusion that this means you just need to be unique and original in order to succeed, because this is something you should be able to “add” to your fundamental musical knowledge and technical abilities.

Every human being is a completely new and different universe on his own, so why this appears not so clearly exposed (so to say) when we see and listen to tons of musicians, and on this specific case, when we see and listen to tons of excellent bass players?

I think that the explanation is quite simple, and it’s because we the musicians, and every artist must learn to let our most profound being flow and pass through our music, pure and untouched. In order to achieve that, in a certain point of our career, we must be able to get to a solid and meaningful conclusion about “Who we are”, and to begin, we should start seriously asking ourselves that fundamental question… if we don’t do that, the chances of coming up with a useful answer are really few.

As you can see, Mother Nature has already done half of the job for you! You are already a special and unique being, the only thing you have to do now is “find yourself within you”, and then immediately establish a direct connection between that ‘finding’ and the very essence of your music and your scenic performance, because in my opinion, if an artist never does so, he/she will always be that un-honest being, showing and sharing something that really does not belong to him/her, but to others that were there before them, instead of using it as a tool for creating new ideas and new concepts, which is something profoundly different.

When it comes to music and bass and achieving successfulness, you MUST be creative…. you MUST be honest with your ideas, concepts and performances…. and most important, you MUST be yourself!

See you on the next folks…