We were lucky to catch up with Shawn Christian recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Shawn , thanks for joining us today. Who is your hero and why? What lessons have you learned from them and how have they influenced your journey?
My hero is Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s my hero because when I was about 13 I got my first instrument which was a bass guitar. I was practicing rudimentary bass lines for about 3-6 months and then I started to study Flea bass lines. I had never heard such difficult and fascinating funk and punk bass lines in my life and my whole outlook on bass playing changed. He was so fast and he played solos like a guitar when he played live and I had never heard such dirty sounds in my life. I got obsessed and started to learn a lot of his songs and started to play his style. After about a year and a half I was really good because of him and him alone, and I practiced a lot. He was the best bass player that lived to me and he still is to this day. Because of him I was able to eventually get a scholarship at a music school for slap bass technique and it’s all because I was studying Flea. So for these reasons Flea is my true hero of music, I’ve learned so much from him and I contribute so much of my skill on bass to learning from him. Thank You Flea if you’re out there! Haha
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
As I mentioned briefly before, I started to play bass when I was thirteen. My dad bought be a bass guitar after I decided I wanted to play. This was the start of a love relationship. I immediately started learning as much as I could and was very good within a year. Playing fast technical “slap” bass lines and hard “fills”. Mainly stemming from the blues and funk genres. After 3 years I started to want to play guitar so I put down the bass and transferred my enthusiasm for music over to learning guitar. Within a couple years I was also very good at guitar, learning from influences like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, parliament funkadelic, Led Zeppelin, and many other rock and blues groups. This set me up to get into Musicians Institute of Hollywood with a scholarship on bass. Today, I can provide a great knowledge of music for bands that I play in. What sets me apart is my ability on bass. I’m very humble but I would like to state that I have a far above average ability on bass guitar. I can play very well. These days I am writing my own music and posting it online and because of my love for music I now know how to play bass, guitar, keyboards and I can sing as well. This is all not to say that I am better than everyone else at music it’s just to say that I love music and I have my own music that I can play now and I can play it all by myself without having to hire multiple instrumentalists to play my songs. This is my proudest achievement to date. The fact that I have stayed with music since I was 13 and I have now learned multiple instruments and am currently writing my own songs makes me very proud and it’s nice to be able to say I stuck with music from the start and never gave up.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
A lesson that I had to unlearn is that things are handed to you in life. I learned this when I was very young. I used to just be a musician and people would compliment me and offer me shows around my town. It was a small town and I was a good musician. I had to unlearn this lesson because when I was 22 I started attending a music school in Los Angeles and I quickly learned that the path isn’t set for you like it is when you’re young. You have to make the path yourself and sometimes there isn’t any help. I was in a city where industry was huge and people were very hungry to succeed. I had no gig offers and I just had to play with friends in rehearsal spaces to play music. I was taught that in the real world you have to earn things for yourself that the next thing isn’t going to come and the person next to will take the opportunity before you if you don’t act and put yourself out there first.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
This is a tricky question that I like because I don’t exactly have a reputation. I am just starting out trying to write my own music and I hope that it would build momentum until I can play live shows in the city of Baltimore. I hope to build my reputation locally with my own band and my own songs that I’ve written and I hope to get exposure that way.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenaturals___?igsh=a3JoeTluZHc1Z3Jl&utm_source=qr
- Other: https://on.soundcloud.com/sdk7dxN96PJsgnRD8