We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Steve Combs a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Steve, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

It’s interesting to look back and reflect on the ways I learned to play bass, and realize how many different ways I tried and how varied they were. I had great teachers, of course, and as a teacher I highly recommend 1-on-1 in-person instruction for everyone, as much as you can get. Beyond that obvious choice, I chose to devote all the time I could outside of lessons. There comes a time when your passion for something, be it music or a sport or any activity, drives you to eliminate lesser interests and diversions so that the maximum amount of your personal time & energy can be spent pursuing that passion. I played alone as much as I could. I don’t say I practiced. It was that, but to me it was strapping on the bass and just playing. I did the stuff I was supposed to practice, but I experimented. I tried crazy stuff to see what noises I could make with this thing plugged in and turned up. I pushed my hands to do things ridiculously fast and all over the instrument, just because it was fun and I wanted to know my limits and how to exceed them. I devoured the liner notes on albums, learned every name, and then read about them in every magazine I could find. When I wasn’t doing that, I was playing with other people or talking about playing with someone. I said yes to every opportunity to haul my gear out and show someone what I could do. Getting that immediate feedback from players in a room pushed me to show them the new things I was learning and to try things I saw them doing. I learned what worked, what was musical, what was excessive, what wasn’t enough. I tried to meet and play with people who were the most talented & most experienced. I’m sure I drove them nuts with all my questions about theory, about tone, about performing, etc. They became my teachers too. It was like I was living every day in a total-immersion school of music, because I put in all the time I could possible afford, in every way I could think of to play.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I realized at some point that if I were that passionate and relentless about learning, there must be others coming up that were like that too. I knew the knowledge I was accumulating would be valuable to someone just starting out, and I found I loved sharing it. Teaching others about what I knew became another way to dedicate more time & energy to the bass, which is all I wanted to do. I couldn’t wait to show another bassist a new technique or song I learned, it made me understand ideas and add to them and was more practice time for me. As I got older and more experienced, I finally started seeing that these jam sessions and me showing off were actually lessons I could be paid for, and that was the beginning. I started putting more structure & thought into teaching, and imagined what a series of lessons might impart to a willing student. Even though I had a long successful career as an engineer, my day job, my obsession with music continued and a cirriculum and methodology formed over the decades that finally became Littleton Bass School in 2018. I’m still looking for those people with the passion like mine, and I channel that same excessive amount of time & energy into preparing and unleashing these new players out into the world. To me, instilling that urge to experiment, reach, learn in every way, and share music is no different from the passion I have always had for playing & learning.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

So much has changed since I began playing, and the resources available now to beginning musicians are incredible. I wish I had half of what’s available during my early journey to expose me to new styles of music and to provide guidance for playing more challenging music. But for someone who has that desire to dedicate a lot of time to exploring, it can be overwhelming. Too many resources and options can be paralysing. Where do you start? One of the great benefits of teaching is that I’m getting a constant crash course in what’s available to students now. Being able to tap into these new tools and options is exhilerating. I’m continuing to learn and I’m able to sort through it all and make it part of my cirriculum in a logical and organized manner. I believe every musician’s creative journey is never-ending, and I’m excited to still be on mine and share all these aspects of it, old & new, with new learners.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I have two very distinct and equally important aspects that I can count on being very rewarding. First is my continued performance experience. It’s hard to think of a more rewarding moment than walking out onto a stage to play, and I am grateful that it is still just as exciting as the first time. The joy of teaching is that I also have exciting and rewarding moments every week and sometimes every day with students. They’re smaller & more frequent, but no less thilling than performing. Those “light bulb” moments when a student gets a new idea or masters a technique are absolutely the best. And as a whole, the student moments are the most rewarding, because I know those will eventually lead to that student having the reward of walking onto many stages and sharing their passion with the world.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.littletonbassschool.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littleton.bass.school/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/littletonbassschool
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/littletonbassschool/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/littletonbasss1

Image Credits
Terry Georgia Steve Combs