the bass ever except for this guy . And then one day my friend who was a very good guitar player , his mother kind of like brought me up — she was my babysitter , so , I kind of grew up with him , and he ’ s an older brother type figure , and great guitar player and he told me ‘ if you want to play rock and roll or you want to play music , you should play the bass .’ Because everybody ’ s looking for bass all over . It ’ s not just here , everybody ’ s looking for bass .
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CM : For you , what was the best route when it came to learning to play bass ?
SINCLAIR : Literally playing by ear . I ’ ve always been more of an ear player than a than a music reading kind of player , I can read music , but it ’ s not my strong suit and I ’ m not a great sight reader . So , I ’ ve always just played by ear and by feel , more than anything , certainly in my career with the Hip . I was the bass player and I playing with the same drummer for 30 years really influences how you play . It becomes a subconscious communication between me and John [ Fay ] when we ’ re onstage . I literally learned on jobs .
RICH BROWN
FRANCIS : One thing that I really appreciated that I had the opportunity to do was to learn so many different aspects of bass technique based off the genre . So , I ’ ve always been exploring with different , blues-based techniques , because a lot of the origins of the different modern music genres that we have today started in the blues . So , I loved learning from the blues and having those connections be really apparent to me when I started to explore into other genres . But I also enjoyed that I was able to also have a classical music background on the upright bass with a bowing technique , and the different kind of practice regimens that they had with that . And so , I think being able to employ different techniques from different genres such as jazz , reggae , R & B , blues , and classical music , give me the ability to switch up and do something different , depending on what kind of style I ’ m playing and what kind of songs I ’ m trying to create .
SYPEREK : We only had this one band , and we rehearsed all the time . We played after school almost every day and besides that , there were a couple of people in the town that I ’ m from that played bass and they gave me some pointers . There was a jazz program at the University so there were a lot
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