Sharing the Stage With Myself

I recently finished a beginner guitar course.

That sentence still feels a little strange to write on a site called Professor Plays Bass.

Bass is still very much my instrument. I’m not changing teams, starting a second channel, or quietly preparing to rename the place Professor Plays Everything. But I’ve been curious about guitar for a while, and I figured learning a little more about what the guitar player is doing could only make me a better bass player.

There was another reason, too.

Starting From Zero — Sort Of

One of the interesting things about learning a second instrument is discovering how much you no longer have to think about on the first one.

When I pick up a bass now, my hands generally know where they’re going. That leaves more room to think about timing, feel, tone, and how the part fits into the song.

Guitar took a lot of that comfort away.

Suddenly I was thinking about chord shapes, clean changes, strings ringing that weren’t supposed to ring, and whether my fingers could get where they needed to go before the next beat arrived.

I was starting from the beginning again—but this time I wasn’t starting from nothing. Nearly two years of learning bass had changed the way I approached learning an instrument.

Learning Enough to Do Something With It

Finishing the course was satisfying, but I didn’t want the course certificate—or the last lesson—to be the finish line.

I wanted to use what I had learned.

So I picked “Beverly Hills” by Weezer and decided to make my first guitar cover.

Except, naturally, I couldn’t leave it at that.

If I was going to record myself playing guitar, I also wanted to play the bass part. That turned the whole thing into a slightly ridiculous but very entertaining experiment: record both performances separately, put them together, and share the virtual stage with myself.

On one side: the bass player who has been doing this for a while.

On the other: the brand-new guitar player making his first appearance.

Same person. Very different comfort levels.

We even had a little fun with the idea. At the beginning of the video, the two versions of me look over and acknowledge each other before we start playing. My son got a particular kick out of that moment. I did too. For all the practice and recording that went into this one, that tiny bit of silliness may be one of my favorite parts.

What Guitar Is Already Teaching Me About Bass.

The point of learning guitar wasn’t to stop being a bass player.

It was to become a better musician—and, as it turns out, it has already changed the way I play bass.

The crossover has been more direct than I expected. The guitar course also taught me how to play bass with a pick, something I had never really developed before. And for Beverly Hills, that’s exactly how I’m playing the bass part.

So even in my first guitar cover, one of the most obvious changes to my bass playing came directly from learning guitar.

Understanding chords from the guitarist’s perspective gives me another way to think about what the bass is supporting. Playing rhythm guitar forces me to pay attention to the groove differently. And hearing both parts come together makes the relationship between the instruments much more obvious than it is when I’m only playing one of them.

There’s also something creatively satisfying about being able to build more of the performance myself.

Until now, most of these videos have been about stepping into the bass player’s role for a song I enjoy.

This one feels a little different.

For the first time, I’m not just joining the band.

I’m starting to assemble one.

Where This Goes Next

I’m still a beginner guitar player, and the video definitely isn’t intended to suggest otherwise.

That’s actually part of why I wanted to make it.

When I started playing bass, documenting the progress became part of the fun. The early recordings didn’t need to be perfect. They needed to exist so I could look back later and see what had changed.

It seems only fair to give guitar the same treatment.

So this is the first one.

A bass player, a beginner guitarist, one song, and a virtual stage that somehow had room for both of us.

We’ll see where it goes from here.