Finding My Bass Notes

Living in a technological world it is easy to adopt a technological philosophy of life. We are inundated everyday through the media with techniques for living a better life. If it’s not a diet that if followed religiously will change our life, it’s a seven, eight, or nine step process to be a better person, pick up women, look better, have more sex, have more rewarding sex, be more successful, get the job you want. If only you follow the rules and apply them to your life, your life is certain to be a better one. 

The way to a better you, as defined by either you or society, is achievable by following a technological process that has been determined through the research of experts. It is irrelevant that every set of experts seems to reference a different set of research data that makes their diet, process, technique better than all of the other ones. Given the amount of techniques out there to turn ourselves into more beautiful, healthier, smarter human beings, it is somewhat surprising that we have not all become Nietzchean god men. 

A classic example of this is The Secret, that book that was all the rage a few years ago, that promised to reveal to all of readers the technique of highly successful and creative people. Given the number of copies that book sold, we should be in the midst of an era of unprecedented greatness. If only we know the secret we too could be achieving world peace, finding the cure for cancer all the while learning to dance tango and cook Cambodian cuisine and raise perfectly adjusted children. It’s just a matter of following the rules for successful living. 

The truth is if I had a dollar for every piece of technique I have followed over the years (and all the money I spent on stupid books with a 10 step process or new technique to get what I want out of life), I’m not sure I would be a better person, but I would sure be a hell of a lot richer, and a whole lot happier. The problem with living technologically is that when it works it is nearly impossible to sustain, and when it fails you are left feeling like a failure, since surely in some way you failed to follow the technique exactly which must represent a failure of character, a lack of discipline and frankly rationally, intellectually it does. 

When a technological process fails, the engineers come in and reassess the process to fix it and find where it is broken. In our world we rush to the doctor and get antidepressants or some other sort of behavioural drug to help us fix what is broken with  us. But maybe nothing is wrong, maybe it’s impossible to live technologically. Perhaps it is our humanity that ultimately gets the better of us. 

The thing about applying rules and techniques to our personal condition is that it speaks to only one part of our personality, the head part; the part that is able to follow the logical progression of rules and techniques and while a particular technique might seem to make sense it ignores the heart part.  What I am talking about is that part of being human that is involved in emotion and passion. (Ironically I’m sure there is a technique for finding more passion in your life).


The movie Black Swan tells this tale better than I ever could. Nina (Natalie Portman's character) is perfect in her technique as a dancer but struggles to find the emotion and the passion in her performance. In spite of her near perfection she is frigid and wooden in her performance and her co-dancers can not relate to her. To truly give the performance of her life she had to find her spirit and ultimately her humanity. 


It is the same for all of us, except the performance is our life and if we are to give the best performance possible we must find our passion and learn to relate. There is no technique that can help us to find our passion, we can be good but we can never be great unless we learn how to relate. We can do everything right but without the relatedness that comes from our humanity we can never truly achieve success. 

I play classical guitar and am very good at reading music or following the rules that are laid out in the notes but I am struggling with two things; firstly with my rhythm and secondly my bass notes. my bass notes are quiet and don’t ring out and I am good with the rhythm as long as I count it out or have a metronome but it does not come naturally.  I struggle with the reality that my technique no matter how good is not enough to produce great music. It is not enough to find my rhythm, I must dig deeper and go beyond following the notes on the page if I am to relate to my music. 

In a recent consultation with a voice therapist I spent some time trying to improve my voice for presentations. Aside from a few exercises that we did he pointed out that the reason that my voice sounded high was that my voice was coming mostly from my mouth. I wasn't speaking from my gut where my bass notes are. Perhaps I am stretching the analogy a bit here, but I can't help but think that my inability to find my bass notes on my guitar and my bass notes in my voice is related to my inability to let go of my technological attitude and live as a human. 


Every great musician knows how to lose himself emotionally in his music. If we are to pursue the moral life then we must abandon the technological life, break the rules for better living and find our bass notes. If we are to be good we must lose ourselves emotionally in our lives as digital and technological as those lives have become. It's a struggle but one that seems worth fighting, the stakes are nothing less than our humanity.