We always hear about learning life lessons thru other people’s or your own experiences. I have learn some thanks to my bass guitar.
My faithful 5-string is a Curbow, specially designed by the late Greg Curbow to be crafted by the Cort factory in South Korea. My other options were a Steinberger Spirit XZ-25 and a Tobias Toby Pro 5. (This was way back in 2000, during the MusicYo! era).
I can say that both the Tobias and the Steinberger needed some customizing to be able to meet my demands, but as soon as I got the Curbow, there was no turning back: I found exactly what I was looking for. And as it happens with any human interaction, each virtue is also a defect at once. It all depends ot your viewpoint.
What my Curbow taught me was that features, simply, are. But is our perception what morph them into good or bad ones, just like people. The same person that can be seen as “perseverant” can be described by others as “stubborn”.
So… following my time-honored (or boring) analytical mind, I wrote some features of my Curbow bass. And as you will see, each one can be seen as either a defect or a virtue.
How many times have we wondered how can someone be attracted to certain person? Why something we are proud of can be an annoyance to others? For example, I have played with great guitar virtuosos who had to be replaced because our music was boring for them, and their work suffered because of that. They turned a great gift into a defect for the band.
When it comes to my bass, I am a very skinny guy so I prefer a small and lightweight instrument. However, I let a very large man play my Curbow once and they looked ridiculously fun together! Too bad I didn’t took a picture, but it looked like this:
While many people love the Curbow looks, I still remember a sound engineer who told me “Wow, your bass looks SO GAY!”. Maybe he expected me to use a battered P-bass for a hard rock band instead of a petite, curvaceous beauty. However, after the concert he said: “Your bass still looks gay, but it sounds amazing!”
Right there lies another lesson: so many times we are annoyed by one negative comment instead of the majority of positive reactions to our work. Why does it bother so much? Is that person someone you trust, or an expert in the field? Why does he care? Is he paying for our work?
As seen before, his comment was about the contrast between a tough rock band image and the delicate shape of my bass. Sometimes that can be useful to attract attention (a common issue for bass players, hehe), but at the end, the Curbow’s tone was undeniable.
And that’s yet another lesson: if you’re doing a good job, everything else is meaningless. I could have gotten a Precision bass like anyone else, but I can’t stand neither its weight, nor the thick neck shape, nor the fact it has an enormous neck heel that forces to stick the thumb out, nor the fact it only has 20 frets. My Curbow is lightweight, comfortable, has easy access to each of its 27 frets, and (unlike most Fenders) can be setup with a very low action even with my preferred thicker gauge strings. And its sound is unique yet versatile.
At the end, the biggest life lesson given by my Curbow is to keep focused into what’s really important for me. I don’t have to settle for what others think I need. Yes, I should listen carefully to their advice, learn from their wisdom, but work towards getting what I need and want, because not everyone has the same needs and desires.
Thank you, Maestro Greg Curbow, for creating the bass I needed.