------I'm on facetime with Phoebe. I'm not sure if she sees me because its dark in my room. The lights are shut off and the only light sources in the room are from my phone and my desktop workstation. My arms feel like a thousand pounds because I had just hauled a twenty pound box with the dimensions of 46'' x 17'' x 6'' about a mile away to the post office. I know that seems oddly specific and thats because it's a guitar box. Well in this case I shipped a bass. One that I'm feeling very ambivalent about right now.
------"Are you gonna write about your bass in your journal?" I hear her ask through the tiny speakers of my phone. She says this with a hint of sarcasm.
------"Yeah sure why not," I sigh.
------I bought this bass at 2014. It was the third bass that I had ever owned. I don't consider myself a bassist, but I think I can get by in a gig or as a session musician which I have done for this instrument. Back in 2014, I was pretty hip on buying and selling guitars and basses. I had just gotten out of high school a year before and I didn't own a bass. I was recording this song with garageband on my iphone back in the day and I needed a bass. I ended up finishing that recording by using an octave pedal and faking a bass guitar sound with one of my electric guitars. I knew then I had to go buy one, so I started looking.
------I had owned a bass around 2010, which was my first bass. I had traded that thing for a better guitar amp. I feel like I'm going into a tangent about my first bass which is not the point of this entry but I'll write it here under a spoiler tag in case you're interested.
------I was 16 when I had bought this bass. I was really into point metal guitars. That was my aesthetic at the time. I was really into thrash metal like Metallica and Slayer. I was also super into the ESP LTD brand, and for a while I only bought guitars from them, specifically at their pointy models. The downsides of super pointy instruments like these is they chip and ding easily!
------After buying and selling, I had came upon the perfect one. A Dean Edge Pro in Tiger Eye finish. Here's the picture I used for my eBay listing: [Click!] I loved this bass. I played more shows with this bass and did session work with this bass more than the guitars I had bought around the same time. I did a music video shoot of a song with this bass. I'm sure theres also photographs of me playing this bass from the shows I had done back then. I've also recorded at least two EP's and a bunch of other songs with this bass. One of the main reasons I loved it because of its neck through construction. Compared to other neckthru's in its price point at the time, this had one of the best upper fret access. This bass was played heavily by me and it had the scars to show it. When I bought it, the brass/gold hardware all shiny, and over the years it had patina.
------I had to let it go though. Yes because of covid and financial reasons, but also because I wasn't really using it anymore. My taste has changed over the years. Kinda like how I only used to like pointy metal guitars, I used to like HEAVY guitars. I emphasize the word heavy in caps because this bass weighed a ********. I'm a small person around 5'4ish. I remember this bass killing my shoulder after every rehearsals and shows. And when I was sitting down with it to play, It would stop the blood flow to my legs. I believed back then that more mass and heavy guitars equates to more sustain and tone, theres science that actually disproves that. My current taste are actually headless, due to the ergonomics and lightweight. I'm a proud mom of two strandbergs now even though they cost $$$$. Ibanez just recently released their EHB (ergonomic headless bass) series this year, and I had just bought one. I needed to recoup the losses, so my bass had to go despite the lovely memories we shared together.
------Yes I'm sad about it, but in a weird way I'm happy because I know its going to a better home now. The buyer is to some guy named JT in Illinois. He messaged me on eBay and had bought it a couple of days prior. He reassured me that it's going to be loved as much as I have. He probably won't have the same issues I had with it, aka it probably won't be heavy for him. I'm just tiny!
------"You know what it is... It's like saying goodbye to a friend that you knew for a long time, and they moved away to a different state. And you know that friend probably won't ever call and contact you ever again because this friend isn't a person but an object," I turn and face towards my phone to Phoebe.
------"That sounds sad."
------"Yeah it kinda is."
Thanks for reading. This is Anikacy, goodbye tiger eye!
