Once I started fooling around on the guitar, I guess it was only a matter of time before I decided I ought to have a go at playing the bass as well.

Even before I started playing bass, my record collection included plenty of albums like Rocks, Pebbles and Sand by Stanley Clarke, and Champions by Jeff Berlin's Vox Humana where the bass playing was the part of the music taking centre stage. And that was why I'd bought them. Bass-driven music can have an incredible drive to it; it can really thunder along. Geddy Lee's playing in the Canadian rock band Rush is a case in point: even before I started playing bass myself I could tell that there was a stunning level of proficiency involved in what he was doing. As you'll see in a moment, Geddy's one of my biggest influences.

The interest in Motörhead helped, too: listen to any Motörhead album and you'll learn that very quickly. If you look behind the image, Lemmy was actually a highly innovative bass player. Knowing the sheer power required to play bass like a rhythm guitar convinced me very rapidly that the man had superhuman abilities.

I've gradually expanded and refined the gear that I use for adding bass to my recordings over the years, but some bits of kit that I bought when I was just starting out on the instrument forty years ago are not just still with me, they are still in regular use.

This is the first bass I ever bought—an Ibanez Blazer, which I bought at a jumble sale in north London for next to nothing. It was very cheap because it had been mutilated by its previous owner, who had ripped out its frets with a pair of pliers and filled in the resulting holes with Tetrion to make it a fretless.

After a visit to Roger Giffin of Giffin Guitars in Kew, it now sports a proper ebony fingerboard and a Schaller bridge, and with roundwound strings on it, it's one of the best sounding fretless basses that I've ever heard. I'd never part with it voluntarily.

The next bass I bought was a considerable step up in just about every way. It's a Jaydee "Roadie II Active" bass, as used by Mark King of Level 42. Unlike the Ibanez, it contains a built-in amplifier with a three-band equaliser to boost and shape its output signal and believe me, that makes a big difference to the sort of tones you can get out of it. After a recent trip to my local guitar shop for some TLC (big thanks to Intersound Guitars in Dursley) and an afternoon spent bringing the action down and setting it up properly, it's playing beautifully once again.

Paradoxically, these days the instrument that I use to record quite a lot of the bass parts for my music isn't really classed as a bass at all. I moved into Extended Range Guitars territory a few years ago with an Ibanez RG9-BK nine-string guitar. The additional three strings below the guitar's standard EADGBE tuning are tuned C# F# B, low to high. That gives me a considerable reach in terms of notes to play, and with the signal DI'd into my DAW from a Zoom G6 effects unit, I'm really pleased with the tone I get, although the extreme low end does tend to get a bit flappy.

Mark King wasn't the only influence on my bass-playing style. I have been in awe of Geddy Lee of Rush's abilities on the bass since I first saw him play live, way back on their Tour of the Hemispheres in 1979. Once Fender brought out a signature model of his Jazz Bass, I knew I'd end up having to get one. It's a faithful replica of the '72 model which Geddy bought for $200 from a pawn shop in Kalamazoo, MI back in the 1970s. He used that bass to record "about half of Permanent Waves" but it wasn't until 1993, when he picked it back up for recording Counterparts, that it really came into its own. Although Geddy has around 25 different models of the Jazz in his collection and many others by different manufacturers as well, the '72 Fender remains his main bass guitar to this day. I can totally see why; I absolutely love mine.

Trey Gunn has been another big musical influence of mine for many years. He plays in bands with friends of mine, and when I sought his advice in 2024 about whether I should buy one of his signature model Warr Guitars which a mate of mine had offered me the option of buying second-hand, his response was very simple: "Yes. Buy it!"

I didn't need to be told twice.

The Crafty Tuning it uses pushed me completely out of my comfort zone, which was a big reason for getting it in the first place. It's had a profound effect on my approach to composition, and within a few weeks of getting it, I'd released an album written almost entirely with it called Unknown Territory.

But the RG9 and the Warr are not the only instruments that I use for playing bass that aren't basses: The Chapman Stick is still an uncommon instrument, even though Emmett Chapman invented it back in the 1960s. I've been playing one for over thirty years and I've put together a separate Chapman Stick page if you want to know more about it.

I can still remember making my debut as a bass player. I got together with a few of the local musicians during a street party we held in 2002 for the Queen's Jubilee and had a bit of an impromptu jam session, and although we made most of it up as we went along, it was great fun getting everyone to sing along to a selection of old standards; it was the first time I'd played Jerusalem at all and even if my rendition wasn't as accomplished as Greg Lake's, we all managed to get to the end at the same time and most of us even managed to stay in the same key!

As you can see, the 100 watt Vox Venue amp that I had at the time was quite useful as a convenient seat. And yes, that's a 40-pint container of Brand Oak Bitter, a.k.a. BOB, made by our local brewery over in Wickwar. Its presence may have had more than a little to do with why that day went so well (or, at least, why I remember it being so much fun)...

It was more than a decade before I was persuaded to play in public again. I played Chapman Stick at a friend's birthday party in London a few years ago, and apart from a few problems with the bass amp I was using, I had a great time.

Maybe it was because I'd developed a habit of sitting on it, but the Vox eventually died on me, so it was replaced by a Phil Jones Bass combo that has two five-inch speakers in it—with Kevlar cones. There is no comparison with the single, flappy twelve-inch cone that the Vox was fitted with; the PJB lets me hear every nuance of what I'm doing. It also has a DI output, which means my studio recordings have dramatically improved. All of this forced me to work much harder on my technique and so it has not only radically changed the sound of my playing, it's also made me level up my chops in the process—not just a little bit, but a lot.

And once I'd done that, not only would I grab any opportunity I could to get on stage with a bass, you'd struggle to keep me off it.

What has been really gratifying is that once I started playing in front of other people, they noticed how much I'd levelled up and started asking me to play bass on their recording projects. I was absolutely chuffed to bits when one of them messaged me after a recent session, saying:

"You are a very good session bassist, you know. "

Day. Made.

When bass players start talking about slapping and popping, don't be alarmed. These are particularly funky ways of plucking the strings to get a more aggressive sound.

As you may have guessed from the fact that I own a JayDee, it got to the stage after I'd been playing for a while where I wanted to emulate Mark King's style, so I dived deeply into the intricacies of Level 42's music. I shut myself away in the back bedroom of my house in Milton Keynes, plugged a pair of headphones into the back of my hundred-watt Vox Venue so that I didn't drive the neighbours completely mad, and tried to figure out how Mr King was doing what he did.

Initially, playing slap bass was one of the most frustrating things I've ever attempted. I'd see all the flash players on MTV hammering on and pulling off without any effort whatsoever, but try as I might my hands just wouldn't produce the same noises. Then, one evening, in the space of about five minutes, something clicked inside my head and I finally "got" how you did it. There was no gradual shift—one minute, I was flailing about with no idea of what I was doing at all and the next I was snapping and popping with the best of them. It's still one of the strangest learning experiences I've ever had (and as a professional instructional designer, I've had quite a few of those in my time), but it makes the point: keep practising, because things might click for you in the next five minutes.

Those five minutes were also the point at which I decided that I could finally call myself a "proper" bass player. From then on, I started listening carefully to how other bass players approached what they played to see if I could figure out what they were doing, too.

Since then I've diligently worked out as many bass lines as I could (or come up with an approximation of the original artist's playing that could almost be convincing with a following wind and after a few beers, at least). I've got to the stage now where the sort of playing that I'm aspiring to is something like Joe Dart does for Vulfpeck. I might not be there yet, but in the past few years I have astonished myself by getting far closer than I ever thought I could. Before I got the PJB amp and the Jazz Bass, I just assumed that playing at that sort of advanced level would always be completely beyond me. But apparently that's not true.

Additionally, in playing along with countless records, I've also learned something that is far more valuable than being able to slavishly copy someone else's style: I learned how to play to the beat, and what it feels like to play just ahead of it, or just behind it. Yes, that's a thing. How so?

Because a bassist must work with the drummer to establish not just the tempo of the music, but also mystical qualities that are given odd descriptions such as "playing in the pocket" or "locking in" or—simply—the "groove". The rest of the band rely on the groove that the bass and drums lay down so that they can do what they do over the top without everything disintegrating. If you've ever played in a band you will be well aware of how often it is that the guitarist is more interested in self-indulgent plank spanking and fret wankery (which are equally well-known terms in musical jargon) than they are in playing in time, and the keyboard player will either be making silly farting noises with their synths or playing Van Halen's "Jump." Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt.

So, how do you learn to keep a regular beat? Well, practising with a drum machine going in the background has worked well for me. I found that if you practise for long enough you will develop an ear for a steady tempo. Again, if you persevere you eventually develop the weird ability to recognise when the tempo drifts—not just when you're playing in a band, but even when when you're listening to a recording made by somebody else. There's nothing inherently wrong with a drummer who speeds up or slows down in response to the feel of the song; Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones was a legendary example of someone who knew just how to change tempo to drive the song, but these days I no longer wonder why using a click track is so popular...

Apart from being the title of a Mark King solo album, influences are very important in shaping your playing style. Aside from the Level 42 bassman, I particularly admire the playing of Geddy Lee, Tony Levin, Jaco (of course), Joe Dart, Nick Beggs, Jeff Berlin, Stanley Clarke, Les Claypool, John Giblin, Stu Hamm, Jonas Helleborg, Dave Holland, Mick Karn, Matthew Seligman, Jimmy Johnson, Jimmy Haslip, and Lemmy (again, of course). Even though several of these artists are no longer with us, they continue to shape my playing in one way or another. I'm repeating myself at this point but the astonishing playing of Vulfpeck's Joe Dart has made a massive impression on me in recent years and you absolutely need to check him out.

I've put a page together with some information on the musicians who have had a great effect on me—you'll find it on my groups page.

I've tended to stick with roundwounds until relatively recently, even on the fretless. I have also tended to gravitate towards lighter strings—the Jaydee in particular is much easier to play with lighter gauges and it doesn't knacker your hands quite as much when you play it for extended periods. Why make things harder for yourself, eh? But after becoming obsessed with the bass playing of Joe Dart I decided to put a set of flatwounds on the Jazz Bass and suddenly I got why people like them so much.

• Ibanez "Blazer" custom 4-string, fretless
• Fender "Geddy Lee" Jazz Bass
• Jaydee "Roadie II Active"
• Ibanez RG9-BK 9-string guitar
• TGSS-8 Warr Guitar, Crafty tuning
• Chapman Stick, ironwood 10-string
• Boss BF2 Flanger
• Boss CE2 Chorus
• Zoom G6 effects processor (Stick lead side)
• Phil Jones Bass Briefcase Ultimate 2 x 5 150 W bass combo
• Blackstar Core:ID 15 1 x 12 15 W combo (Stick lead side)

Over the past fifteen years or so I have become much more (some of my friends might say fanatically) interested in writing and recording my own music. In 2020 I completely gutted the back bedroom of my house to turn it into a home studio. Not to put too fine a point on it, music has become an obsession. In an attempt to explain just why this has happened, I've put together a Music Page which provides an account of how my musical adventures started, where they've taken me, and where they might be taking me next.

You can hear lots of my playing on Bandcamp, where I've built up a fairly significant body of work in the decade or so since I first created an account there. The Fender Jazz features heavily on my recent album Jaywalking and it also takes pride of place on the cover: