I know it sounds thoroughly unenlightened, but I’m against female band members. My conviction has nothing to do with their abilities as musicians, though I’ve worked with fewer adequate female players than male. My position concerns human nature. As a songwriter and performer, it’s pretty reasonable to desire some recognition for the hard work that I do. The fact is however that if there’s woman in your band, it doesn’t matter what she’s doing, she’s getting special attention. Exactly what does that do for me as I try to sell records?

Think of any group that had a female member. Did the guys in the band, regardless of how talented they were, get the same attention? Absolutely not. My favorite example is No Doubt. Do you even know the names of the other members? Neither do I. Do people speak as highly of Dave Stewart as they do of Annie Lennox? No. The only thing that saved Fleetwood Mac was that there were two women to kind of balance things. Name a male member of Heart. I can’t do it either. Exceptions that prove the rule are Sly and the Family Stone and The Revolution. You have to be as ostentatious as Sly with fairly unattractive women, or like Prince, more woman than those in your band will ever be, to get by this attention struggle.

Jeff Beck was touring with this female bass player named Tal Wilkenfeld. You might think that anyone who cared enough to want to see Jeff Beck might be immune to the female distraction problem, since after all, you have to dig Jeff for his musicianship. That’s all there is to his act. But no. The video footage of the tour kept going back to the girl and the internet was full of speculation about who she was and how bright her musical future must be. My response to Tal was that tone is in your hands, and that it’s lame to let your amp do all the work. No one ever would have thought twice about a young guy who only switched to bass from guitar five years ago. He just would have been considered lucky to be playing with Jeff Beck, case closed. But the girl? Oh she’s pretty too! Please. Never fails.

I broke the female band member rule once. It was in my first true original band. I was about 19 or so. I had a big group with a horn section. I was trying to find any horns that would play in a rock band and was taking anything I could get to see my vision through. A young woman who played saxophone called me after seeing a flyer we posted at Morris County College. Her name was Martina. I hesitated. I asked her what key I should write her charts in. She said that she played tenor but I shouldn’t worry about re-writing the alto charts because she could sight transpose. Sight transpose? If there was ever a reason to make an exception, this was it.

As it turned out, Martina couldn’t sight transpose. We didn’t get to play any gigs with her, but many of the guys in the band talked a lot about who was going to try to get with her. They just couldn’t get around the primal grunt she would make when she was recording horn hits. Since she was the only one overdubbing a part and the music was only in her headphones, everyone in the room listened to her playing those short little notes, each one of them followed by a soft “uh.” It drove them crazy.

A few guys in the band went out one night and got drunk with Martina, who as I understand was still coherent enough to beg them not to tell me about how drunk she got. Why? I have no idea. All I wanted was to have my charts played. That never really happened to my satisfaction. Did she get thrown out? No. Why? Because she was a really wild chick who would show up at rehearsal fresh from an evening at the Limelight, wearing a purple wig and clothes lifted from a Salvation Army bin in the dead of night, and some guys in the band, who had a say in the membership, were trying to figure out who would get with her. See what I mean?

So as I peruse ads looking for band members or bands to play with, it’s an easy filter. All I have to see is “female fronted band” or “female singer/songwriter looking…” and I know that I can move on. People will never see anyone on stage next to a woman as anything but a sideman, even if he does all the work. And that’s just not enough for me. My wife asked if I would ever let our daughter hear me say that. My response was that she probably would. She was afraid it would discourage our daughter from music. On the contrary, I told her. If our daughter chose music as a vocation, being a woman could only help her. She’ll never have to fight for attention like the guys will. And for her, I said, I’d break the female band member rule without even thinking.

Man, I don’t see worth a damn no more. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I mean, I can see, but I wear my glasses far more than I needed to last year at this time. In my studio, I need to wear them or I’m absolutely useless. I can’t make out what’s on the computer screen. If I try to work without them, I get tired very easily. I haven’t played a pit orchestra in some time. Maybe four years or so ago was the last one. If I ever play a pit again, I know I’ll need my glasses then. It was always hard enough to see the music using only a stand light. If they gelled them too, it was even rougher. Now I’m sure I’d feel the difference quickly.

It might be age, but it’s also computers that are contributing to the degradation of my eyesight. Humans weren’t meant to stare at luminous screens for hours and hours on end. I do that every day. I work using a computer, so I can’t get out of that too easily (though I suppose I could, if I were determined enough).

I’ve got to get new glasses. The pair that I have now don’t even fit my face well. If I’m reading a book, I have to adjust my arms to make sure that it’s far enough in front of my face, because if I don’t do that, I look down onto the page under my glasses, instead of through them. Another thing is that I have a big head. I guess I do anyway. Finding glasses that actually grab my ears the right way is very difficult for me. Add to that my crooked nose, which always makes them sit on an angle and you’ve got a bad head for glasses. My first pair was just that, the first pair. I didn’t know how they were supposed to fit. My old man’s been wearing glasses since he was four. He can tell an optician exactly how to fix a pair so that they fit right. I wonder if his yolks are what I have to look forward to… trifocals. Fuck that man. He actually gets neck aches from moving his head up and down trying to find the right prescription for what he’s looking at. I can’t do a thing about it though.

However, nothing compares to seeing everything vividly. What they always told me was true. When you put glasses on after not having had them, you realize instantly all of the limitations of flawed vision that you’ve been living with. I just had to get used to mine. Originally, when I looked at my monitor while wearing my glasses, it appeared to be slightly trapezoidal. That’s stopped now. Thank Christ.

A little over a year ago, I replaced the pickups in my Fender Precision Bass. I was lacking something in the tone of the instrument with the stock pickups. It was my first foray into customizing any of my instruments.

Highly technical content coming…

The replacement pickup I chose was the Lindy Fralin P-Bass replacement. It was recommended to me by this cat at Carmine Street Guitars in New York. After doing a little research, I learned that these things are hand-wound (10 thousand turns of copper wire) and have a rich and vintage tone. I hoped that they would give me what I was missing. After Lindy filled my order (small shop that builds these things… they don’t even take credit cards…), I set about soldering them into my bass. I liked the tone I got. I loved even more that I didn’t cook anything beyond function by overheating it with the soldering iron. My friend Jason thinks nothing of modifying his vintage Fender amps, getting in them with a soldering iron and switching out components. I’m good with pickups, but I don’t have the guts to start tinkering with my amps just yet.

Soon after I installed the Fralins, I noticed that when I touched the magnet poles without touching the strings, I got this popping sound followed by a buzzing noise, like there was a grounding problem. Under most circumstances, I wouldn’t hear the noise, but it drove me nuts anyway. When I would record the instrument, every now and then I’d hear that pop. Damn it! I contacted Evan Gluck, who runs New York Guitar Repair and he agreed to see me on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. He went through my whole instrument and just couldn’t beat this buzz! Arrgh!!! In the process, he replaced almost everything in the circuit, which is pretty simple. Pots, jack and capacitor. He even thought it had been wired strangely for a Precision Bass, so he re-wired it to the classic configuration. No luck. To the guy’s credit, he didn’t charge me for anything but the parts, because he didn’t find the problem. A call he made to Lindy the following day yielded some interesting information. Precision Bass pickups just do that. Huh? Never noticed that before. How could I have missed that?

In the year and half that’s passed since that day, I’ve lived with the pickup idiosyncrasy. I also was living with a more limited tone control sweep. Maybe it was the new pickups that I hadn’t had a chance to get used to, but I could swear I had a greater sweep of tone possibilities with tone control when I had the stock Fender pickup installed. Hmm…. I had much more important things to worry about in 2007. Now that I don’t, I decided to start obsessing about my bass tone again.

Last week, I finished a piano track for a new song called “The Strings.” It went so well that I had plenty of energy left, so I grabbed the bass and was going to add that part as well. When I established a gain structure for the bass, I heard the infernal pop/buzz in my headphones along with a new hum that I hadn’t noticed before. Damn it! These Fralins sound great, but they might be more trouble than they’re worth. I also started to wonder if Evan’s rewiring of my bass had anything to do with it. And what was up with that tone control anyway? Then it hit me. Did he use the right capacitor for the filter circuit? The way a tone control works on a Precision Bass is that as you turn the control down, more of the high frequency information in the signal is sent to the ground, which gives you the “low” tone. It just filters out more of the highs. I looked up the P-Bass wiring diagram on the Fender site and found that the capacitor should be rated at .05 mF. I opened the bass and discovered that Evan had used a .02 or something. I had the math straight in my head when I first looked at it, but suffice it to say for now that I figured out where all of my tone sweep went. It would’ve worked on a Stratocaster, but this is a Precision Bass.

I went to Radio Shack, which used to be one of my favorite places as a kid. I used to love looking at all the project boards and chassis and components, with all of the possibilities that lay in knowing how to hook things together the right way. (I almost became an electrical engineer, but it left too little time for the bass. True story.) Today, however, you go to Radio Shack for a goddam cell phone battery. Adding to the problem was that there were no electrical supply stores left, it seemed. I had to try Radio Shack.

As a sort of relic, a legacy symbol, they still sell loose components. They sell capacitors like Dunkin’ Donuts still sells donuts. Few people actually buy them, but they have to keep them around anyway or else the joint wouldn’t even make sense from a marketing perspective. I couldn’t find a single .05 mF capacitor in the entire drawer. The guys working there didn’t know what a capacitor was, which I predicted. I was hosed. Where would I get the tone sweep I wanted? I would have to order it on the Internet and wait for the time it took to be delivered. God, I don’t have the patience for that! When I got home, I remembered that Evan gave me my old parts when he rebuilt the electronic portion of my bass. There, on the old pot in a box somewhere, was a .05 mF capacitor that I desoldered and then reused. I also wired the bass the way it was originally and reinstalled the old ¼ inch jack. Even that fit better. I reinstalled the Fender pickup and put everything back together.

I tested the bass and despite the limitations of the stock pickup that originally bothered me, it worked fine and my tone sweep was back. Then I noticed that touching the poles made the same grounding noise! I also reproduced the hum. Lindy was right. They just do that. I decided that my ears are just getting better. All this recording will do that. I hear everything. I may not hear what you’re saying in the next room, but I’ll hear a 60 cycle hum poking through the noise floor, regardless of whether it shows up on the VUs.

I tried other basses in a music store. Same deal. Fascinating. I tried a Jazz Bass. A little better, but I just love the P-Bass too much. It’s really my axe.

So now the Lindy Fralins are back in, with the original tone circuit this time, and I’m awaiting the delivery of some no-hole pickup covers. If I can’t touch the poles, I won’t get that pop and buzz. That’s my theory anyway. Maybe it’ll even look interesting. How many guys have no-hole covers on their Precision Basses? We’ll CP is the only one I can think of! Nice. The hum is something I’ll try to cancel as best I can by adjusting pickup height. They will buck some of the hum if the two pieces are working together.

I’ll bet the hum isn’t even that bad. I’m just a total P-Bass tone freak.