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Adventures in Bassland?
18 years ago
A journal, by me.
I'm posting a journal. That in and of itself is adventurous, at least for me.
So thanks to Snowie, my bass is restrung and retuned and I'm relearning what little I knew before (I like to repeat re-, I suppose ;) ). Despite the pickups, cable, and possibly contacts being a little... er... rusty from neglect, it still sounds bright when I play and I'm picking it back up quickly enough.
Started with my old practice songs, Oye Como Va by Santana and Sunshine of Your Love by Cream, and found that I hadn't forgotten as much as I had assumed I did. I can even still play most of 46 & 2 when my fingers want to behave!
Well, having those standards down pretty quickly, I decided I'd search for some tabs to some other songs I'd wanted to learn; mostly Witchy Woman by the Eagles and American Girl by Tom Petty (I guess I'm just stuck on the classics - can you blame me? They're classic for a reason), but to my surprise, a bunch of my favorite tab sites from back when I played before (basstabarchive.com, most notably) had removed all of their tabs due to threats of lawsuits by the NMPA and MPA!
Now, it seems to me that, as ridiculous as they are, at least the RIAA's MP3 lawsuits can prove some semblance of damages that (sort of) make sense. But removing tabs? That's just off the wall! There's nothing that they could possibly lose on a scale large enough to actually threaten a lawsuit! The worst I can imagine is that some garage band looks up the tabs to one of their favorite songs and maybe makes $50 playing a bar or a club somewhere. Oooooh, big loss, MPA!
The other thing that struck me as odd is that it's legal for a "parody" artist, such as Weird Al, to play a parody of some other band's music (although in his case he traditionally seeks permission) and actually make money on it; yet they don't want me to learn American Girl for my own practice at no profit?
Go figure. Concept of ownership really blows when you get beyond a physical object and into the realm of intellectual property.
So, I figure the best way to get around this is to tab everything anyway, and if they threaten to sue you, just say, "Oh, no, these are the tabs from my parody of your song, "Blamerican Girl."
So thanks to Snowie, my bass is restrung and retuned and I'm relearning what little I knew before (I like to repeat re-, I suppose ;) ). Despite the pickups, cable, and possibly contacts being a little... er... rusty from neglect, it still sounds bright when I play and I'm picking it back up quickly enough.
Started with my old practice songs, Oye Como Va by Santana and Sunshine of Your Love by Cream, and found that I hadn't forgotten as much as I had assumed I did. I can even still play most of 46 & 2 when my fingers want to behave!
Well, having those standards down pretty quickly, I decided I'd search for some tabs to some other songs I'd wanted to learn; mostly Witchy Woman by the Eagles and American Girl by Tom Petty (I guess I'm just stuck on the classics - can you blame me? They're classic for a reason), but to my surprise, a bunch of my favorite tab sites from back when I played before (basstabarchive.com, most notably) had removed all of their tabs due to threats of lawsuits by the NMPA and MPA!
Now, it seems to me that, as ridiculous as they are, at least the RIAA's MP3 lawsuits can prove some semblance of damages that (sort of) make sense. But removing tabs? That's just off the wall! There's nothing that they could possibly lose on a scale large enough to actually threaten a lawsuit! The worst I can imagine is that some garage band looks up the tabs to one of their favorite songs and maybe makes $50 playing a bar or a club somewhere. Oooooh, big loss, MPA!
The other thing that struck me as odd is that it's legal for a "parody" artist, such as Weird Al, to play a parody of some other band's music (although in his case he traditionally seeks permission) and actually make money on it; yet they don't want me to learn American Girl for my own practice at no profit?
Go figure. Concept of ownership really blows when you get beyond a physical object and into the realm of intellectual property.
So, I figure the best way to get around this is to tab everything anyway, and if they threaten to sue you, just say, "Oh, no, these are the tabs from my parody of your song, "Blamerican Girl."
*laughs* I actually was at a good site last night that had them, but I'll have to look through my history to see if they had the ones that you wanted. I'll let you know. I look forward to hearing you play bass!