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Music or Gear… What Do You Want to Become, a Bass Player or a Bass Proprietor? It’s Time for YOU to Weigh in! by Meet Igor Saavedra
Meet Igor Saavedra –
First of all I wish you a superb 2011, full of music and happiness!
That being said… I think this article doesn’t need to be really long…. it’s about focusing on the problem and putting it on the table for discussion.
I would like to tell the English speaking bassists that read my columns, that I’ve had my Spanish language website up and going for more than ten years. In fact this website is maybe the first Spanish language website made by a Latin American professional bassist and has been really popular through the years.
I’m not sharing this short story to brag about my site… the reason why I mentioned this is because in those ten years I’ve had a successful section named “Ask Igor”, which has been the equivalent in Spanish language to the “Ask Willis” section on Gary Willis’s site.
On 2007 I answered my one thousandth question… but suddenly something happened and I lost every interest in continuing to answer questions for helping musicians…. And there was a strong reason for that.
Since 2005, approximately, I noticed a suspicious tendency on the questions that were being submitted to my website. How is that? Well…. What I noticed was that just one out of every ten questions being made was about “Music”, and the rest were just about “Gear”. So in general terms the questions were something like:
- “What’s your opinion about this Bass?”
- “Between this Bass and this other Bass, which one is better?”
- “If I change those pickups on this bass would that make it sound better?”
- “How should I have to connect my pedal board?”
- “Please recommend some strings for slapping?”
- “I have this Bass head and this Bass Cabinet… are those compatible? If not what you suggest me to change?”
- “How do I have to equalize my amp for tapping?” ….Etc.
There’s nothing wrong with the questions, and I think they are completely legitimate, and I always answered every question until I realized, as I said before, that 9 out of 10 questions were just about “Gear”. This made me think a lot, because the questions were coming from all Latin America and Spain, which has been my main audience, and the same happened in every country. The first thing I did was to write a notice on top of the “Ask Igor” Section, saying that questions about gear won’t be answered anymore.
Incredibly, the amount of questions dropped down about 80%…. and even more incredibly, within this remaining 20% that was still being submitted, 9 out of 10 questions were still being made about gear! So nobody was reading the notice on top of the page or they just didn’t care at all. What I did on 2007 was to stop answering answers altogether…
That was the most successful Bass Q&A Section in Latin America, but it lost all sense for me, so the counter stopped on question N° 1.032, and who knows if I will continue with that section in the future…. let’s see…
After that experience, I’ve been thinking a lot about the reasons that made the future musicians focus on something which is not the really important thing… and I concluded (Just my opinion here), that this is due to the type of society we are living in… a society based on “consuming” and in “having” instead on “being” or “knowing”… a society where every individual usually prefers to “show what he has”, instead of “showing what he knows”, and if he wants to “show what he knows”, probably he will be doing that just as a means to be able to make good money and later have even more to “show what he has”… and not as an ending in itself.
So what to do?
One possibility is that all the people who focus their attention on gear instead of music already know so much about music that they really don’t need to be asking anything to anybody who supposedly knows more than them about the topic when it comes to choosing what kind of doubt they want to solve, so it’s a better choice to use that opportunity to know more about gear… but I guess that’s not the case 99% of the time… don’t you?
I think problems like this didn’t occur 500, 300, 200, 100 or 70 years ago in the same proportion as now, and that was because in those years “things” were not so common and available and because of that not so important, so musicians in those times mainly focused on what was obvious…. and that was “Music”.
I believe individually, we are not strong or important enough to make a difference just by itself in making the young and upcoming “Musicians” change this undesirable and disproportioned habit, but I’m sure that if more and more people put this discussion on the table and proposes ideas and points of view to stress the fact about which are the real important things for a musician to focus on, that will make a big difference in the future.
I’ve been doing my part about this specific topic since 2007, and now I’m doing it again with this humble article… who wants to collaborate with me on this subject? Please leave your comments below and let’s start a dialogue…
See you in the next month’s article…
Igor Saavedra.
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Photo: Self-portrait by Melissa Auf Der Maur
Melissa Auf Der Maur is a Canadian bassist who played with Tinker, Hole, and The Smashing Pumpkins. She released her own work and is a photographer with photos published in Nylon, Bust, and National Geographic. She released her ‘90s Rock Memoir “Even The Good Girls Will Cry” on 17 March 2026.
KB: Did you always want to be a singer-musician growing up?
I’ve played music my whole life. In school, I played trumpet and sang in a children’s choir, so music was always within me. My mother was the first female disc jockey on the Montreal airwaves; her record collection played a huge role in my inspiration and love of music.
KB: When did you start playing bass, and why this instrument?
When I was 19, the early 90s music explosion began to percolate in tiny clubs around the world. I was lucky to be a ticket girl at Montreal’s underground music club. In one year, I saw Hole, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, White Zombie, and The Breeders – all had female bass players. That’s when the seed was planted. By the age of 22, I was the bass player of Hole.
KB: Which brands of basses have you used in your career, and which one are you using now?
The first bass that I learned on was a vintage Squier Precision. Hole was sponsored by Fender guitars, so I upgraded to Fender Custom Shop Precisions. That is all I play, but I have a cool vintage 8-string Greco that I use on recordings to thicken up guitar parts.
KB: What equipment do you use or have you used with your basses?
Ampeg SVT amps and cabinets, a couple of Sans-Amp pedals, and that is it.
KB: How did you become a member of Hole, and what is your fondest memory of that time?
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins was helping scout a replacement for (RIP) Kristen Pfaff, Hole’s bass player. My band, Tinker, opened for them on the Siamese Dream tour, so Billy had seen me play and could vouch for me. Courtney trusted her talented friend, and that was it. I initially said “no thank you” due to my commitment to my photographic studies and the drama and chaos surrounding the band during the “Live Through This” album release. Courtney took it as a good sign that I said no, so convinced me to reconsider, and soon after, I accepted their invitation, in the name of helping put females in the male-dominated landscape of rock music. My fondest memory is every show we played as a mostly female band, symbolizing what a woman could do in a rock band. Every show had a purpose: get more women to play music.
KB: You are a photographer as well. What makes a great picture? Do you shoot in color or b/w?
I started shooting photographs at age 15. Initially only shot black & white and worked in the art school darkroom. In university, I took a color photography course, and shifted mostly and forever to that, because it was easier to process film on the road when I joined a rock band. I experimented with many cameras, point and shoots, manual, polaroids, medium format, and vintage finds. The trick to a good photograph is to shoot many and all the time – the magic is in the edit and selection process.
KB: Are there artists you would love to collaborate with or wish you had?
??I’ve been lucky to collaborate with some of my favorite musicians in my career. I would still love to collaborate with a new generation heavy electronic artist on an analog bass, heavy electronic drums, and synths collaboration project. Take me out of my usual zone, merging the past and future: my love of 80s dark new wave and new artists exploring that genre. It was very futuristic back then, and we are now, after all, living in the future. I am in the mood to play bass to heavy beats I want to dance to.
KB: What are your 7 favorite bass lines in music across all genres? And why these 7?
“Mountain Song” – Jane’s Addiction (love a rambling, rolling bass line – feels like the ocean waves)
“Black Top – Helmet” (was the first bass line I taught myself)
“Gold Dust Woman” – Hole from “The Crow 2” Soundtrack (it was my first bass line contribution to the band)
“Get Ready” – The Temptations (Motown just feels so good, because of the bass)
“Lucretia My Reflection” – Sisters of Mercy (makes me want to hit the dance floor and play bass simultaneously)
“Be My Druidess” – Type O Negative (full chord bass playing at its best by iconic, demonic, Peter Steele, RIP)
“Romantic Rights” – Death from Above (1979 – unique distorted overdriven tone, combined dance rhythm and melodic intelligence, all in one shot – also! Shout out to a bass & drum only band, which is awesome, and we should have more of, but the bass player needs to be a killer to fill that role.
KB: What are you currently up to?
Releasing my ‘90s Rock Memoir “EVEN THE GOOD GIRLS WILL CRY”. Visceral healing process, it was to get it out of me and write it, but I suspect the real magic will begin by putting it into the world and reflecting with others on what the magic of the ‘90s was all about. Powerful music decade that carried us into what is now a brave new world of digital corporate weirdness – may the past shed a light on our future. That’s my hope for this book release and tour.
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