Why did you give up the band if I may ask?
Whenever I'm without a band, Edith says I get listless and "unbearable at home".
I quit because the band wasn't going anywhere anymore. We had recorded the basic tracks of four new songs in january. And by may, the vocals hadn't even been done yet. The guitars kept changing their parts. And my bass parts were edited beyond recognition.
We hardly ever rehearsed anymore, since we didn't get any gigs. And when we did rehearse, nobody seemed to really be prepared. When we did have a gig it all seemed to futile; starting at midnight, playing the last encore at two thirty in the morning for a bunch of drunks, then hauling your gear through a drunk pub and after that the two hours drive back home.
Having played in bands non-stop for over 34 years I got a feeling of "seen that, done that, been there" (many times over).
When you started with covers it was all fine, fairly easy to get going and get some reasonable gigs. But once you start playing original compositions, the number of gigs starts to dry up.
The only way you can get gigs in The Netherlands is if you play in a tribute band.
I didn't (and don't) want to do that. I had done that when I was 24. Played in a Thin Lizzy tribute and in a Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute for about a year and a half or so. But it got boring quite soon. It felt like borrowed plumes to me. So I didn't want to go back to being in a tribute band when Definition Of Madmen folded.
So I quit. Playing in a band just wasn't fun anymore. I had become bitter and sour. Not a good state of mind to make music...
That was in the summer of 2016.
After I quit, I picked up working on the Gibson Bass Book first. I finished it and got it printed. It was released on december 2016.
And after that I picked up speed with building bass guitars. I had built three bass guitars in the years before during a luthier course.
But I decided to try and do my own hybrid models.
Since 2017 I've been building 4 or 5 per year. I spend every minute of my spare time on building Brooks bass guitars.
I enjoy it so much that I haven't missed playing in a band at all.
I'm lucky enough to be able to build on commission, so I don't get stuck with too many new bass guitars ;-)
Here's a few that I've built:
So I don't get listless or bored at home.