For the Love of Bass Guitar – Dmitry Lisenko

Photo, Aleksej Karasev

For the Love of Bass Guitar – Dmitry Lisenko…

My Story: I am Dmitry Lisenko, a bass player from Latvia with 13 years of experience. Currently I am working on a project, Karmafree, as well as private bass lessons and solo bass performances.

I started playing bass at the age of 16. When I went to the audition in music school they said, “It’s better to be a good street cleaner then a bad musician.” But it didn’t stop me. After finishing high school, I enrolled at the London music university, but dropped it after one year, as the level of education was very low.

In the years since then, I have been busking in London underground, released a solo album, and played in a lot of bands and different projects. I formed my own band “Karmafree” together with my amazing wife. I also recently won a Russian bass players competition.

I have a project, together with my wife, called, “KARMAFREE”. We play different kinds of stuff, mainly with loop stations, a beat box and lots of effects. The main idea is that two people can sound as a full band playing live.

Photo, Aleksej Karasev

Why I started to play bass?

I had a cousin who played bass and was in a Rap-core band. I spent one summer together with him and really liked the lifestyle of a musician. Then one day, my cousin asked me if I wanted to buy his old bass. I told him I couldn’t play, didn’t listen to any music and didn’t even know the difference between bass and guitar. He said, “It’s the simplest instrument in the world, just look at the guitar player and what he is doing and repeat after him; he will play a lot of notes and you just play one.” So I agreed to buy it 🙂

Recently I discovered a new style for bass players called “Percussive Guitar”. It’s very huge on acoustic guitar, but there aren’t any (or many) bass players doing it. So I bought an acoustic bass and started learning. After about 2 months of practice I won a very big bass players competition in Russia. It was a great achievement and inspiration to continue to develop this style on acoustic bass.

Here are my Acoustic bass videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joBRfgu63bQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtEtVaxchSQ

Here are Karmafree videos:

(All music made just by bass and voice)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt95ZoH9rzA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxzbCRU6x7A

Online:

www.youtube.com/user/KarmafreeLife
www.facebook.com/karmafreelife