Finding The Right Tune: An Interview with Thomas Ayres

Chatham-Kent has a good history and diversity of music.  Being directly involved with my hometown's music scene, I am a firm believer in supporting local artists and musicians to the best of my ability.  While living three hours away and covering major label bands, I don't get the opportunity [like I used to] to check out what the next wave of music is for my fellow Chathamites.  Thanks to the golden age of social media, I am able to keep up with bands playing shows at local venues and even taking a glance at some of the live performances.

One of the musicians in Chatham-Kent who has a great online presence and social attitude is Thomas Ayres.  While only playing bass guitar for four years, he has been involved in many projects around CK, put together shows, create tunes, promote his bands (and others around CK), and seems to be a social butterfly.  So what a better person to talk to regarding the new wave of CK's music scene!

Thomas!  Do you mind if I do a small spotlight piece on you as a musician?

Yes, for sure!  I'd be honored to have to have someone interested in putting me in a musician spotlight section on a website. Thank you for taking any sort of interest!  I very much enjoy talking about music, bass guitar related things, and interesting stories, & being a bassist is neat.

So why bass?

Fortunately, I enjoy the writing aspect even if it's for my solo collection.  As I find some people just play bass unfortunately to "be in a band" and don't actually write music, or just play open notes/roots.  Those bassists throw me off to why they even play bass?  Play the god damn triangle guy!  Let someone play bass, that actually has ability!

When was the first time you grabbed a bass and decided you wanted to play it?

Back in 2011, I started my first job (as a dishwasher) and saved up a sum of money.  A friend actually brought up the idea of learning electric guitar, and mentioned that I should learn a bass guitar so we could jam together.  Music was a nice comfortable fun thing.  If I could find a way to replicate/make music as well using my hands, I thought that would be a wonderful fun thing to do!

After I bought the bass (from a pawn shop, bass was uber crappy but i didn't notice at the time), I played it for about four hours every week non-stop, and consistently. I was always interested to learn how to make more sounds and how to cover other people's music.



So you guys eventually made some tunes together?

Unfortunately me and the feller never actually made any music together, something about us with guitars never added up well, together. But we've both have fun apart doing our own things.

So did you start investing more funds into your equipment?

Over time I bought better basses, as my first one wasn't even live playing-able.   Dead notes covered the whole fret board so this was just good for practicing finger stretching, fret spacing, etc.

So what is something music has gotten you to expand on?

I visited Quebec in a mini tour the other week, & if it wasn't for music, I wouldn't have ever left Ontario I'm pretty sure in any sort of interest in other things. That was my first time in my life ever being in a different province then Ontario. And hopefully I visit more places from my time as a 20 year old, till I'm old and brittle.

So I take it you are self taught?  Did you take music lessons at all?

I asked a feller to teach me anything about 2 weeks before I bought my first bass.  What he taught me was a single scale, tabs consisting of 5 notes, and how to hold a bass right.  After a little while he got too busy and had to move to a place out of town, so I had no friends that played bass.  From then on I just had to learn by myself.  I'd find songs I enjoyed and searched the tabs online (hoping that the tabs weren't brutally scripted).

In grade 11, I had a 3 month music class.  The teacher told me I was too slow to learn music theory and couldn't really teach me anything If I slapped anything on the bass, he'd completely dismiss it, so creative wise, there wasn't much room to grow in the class.

I got to play a bass guitar for 30 minutes a day though which was sort of nice at school.  The only person that I've picked up some decent techniques from was John O'Rourke.  He'd teach me Les Claypool styled slap/mute/pop madness bass playing. However, I would like to seek additional musical help in the future.  I'm always all ears for advice!

And you're always looking for more knowledge right?

At some point [maybe when I'm 25] I'll have some more musical theory knowledge down.  But for the time being, I just go by patterns that I know comfortably and things that I know sound good.  I'm never afraid to attempt new things on the guitar, just in my home though.

Playing live you got to play what you know works for sure.  At times I wish I had a teacher teach me what not to bother with at all though, some less wasted time perhaps, but wasted in the name of fun!

What were some of the early songs/tabs you were playing to get the feel for bass licks and such?

The first five days of learning tabs consisted of Black Sabbath ("Iron Man"), Pink Floyd ("Money"), Koji Kondo ("Mario Theme"), Beethoven ("Fur Elise"), and Megadeth ("Peace Sells").  After that it got pretty foggy as I just started learning song after song.


What are some of your influences nowadays?

I'm influenced by a lot of Christopher Wolstenholme (Muse) these days.  I also am heavily influenced by Karnivool, Mike Patton projects (Faith No More, Fantomas, Mr.Bungle), the fretless bass work from Jaco Pastorious & Jeff Amment, Justin Pearson (The Locust, Some Girls) projects, and Luca Cavina (Zeus!).

Why so?

I've always thought they had some of the best bass tone & efx usage, so I've sought for newer tones besides a typical dry bass tone much like the influences I have.  I think he (Justin Pearson) has got some ridiculous bass tone that he provides as well, pre-sculpted inside of his bass lines.

Forgot to mention, I've always loved Mudvayne and Primus bass lines.  Les Claypool and Ryan Martinie are crazy on the bass guitars.  I tried to look up there tabs in the early days.  The controlled mutes and unrelenting amount of notes threw me off hard.  I had no idea how to grasp it but I'm having better luck these days.

Touching bass on solo material, what do you foresee that looking like?  Are you looking to orchestrate a band focusing on your as the founding member and creative influence, or looking to something along the lines of Evan Brewer and keeping all the sounds very bass like?

Evan Brewer is wonderful.  His work in The Faceless is flawless (although I love his solo work a lot though...perhaps even more).  He's got great ideas.  I think I may do some completely solo stuff with bass and use a loop pedal to play over top of parts.  However as you can see Evan Brewer playing 2 bass guitars at the same time is even more entertaining and talent straining.  I may attempt to get my skill somewhere sub-par to his ability.  

I may use other instruments however included with the bass as I don't wish to limit myself at all.  For now the only thing that I can play fairly well would be so I could see my music in that project being around 95% bass guitar work. I have a makeshift drum kit and an electric SG that I could use to record other parts.  I would just need a splitting output pedal so I could plug multiple instruments into my amp to replicate it in a live situation.  It may take awhile to get all of the songs in place and album-like construction however.

I have about 8 songs recorded (6 of them in demo stage) but am still looking for pieces that work together more better/are more musically interesting.  I'm giving Evan Brewer's "Your Itinerary" album another listen as I type this, and damn its very inspirational. The dude is even better then I remember.  Thank you on reminder of his work!

Any final thoughts?

It's been just over 4 years now and I don't think I plan on stopping.  I think it's mostly because I am addicted, and new music still entertains me!  So I don't see my self being bummed out about making /playing music anytime soon.  Hopefully never...

If you live in or around my hometown of Chatham-Kent, be sure to check out the local music scene as it's constantly booming with new musicians like Thomas.  You can check out Thomas' work at the following Facebook pages:

We Sleep At Dawn

Elastic


Lamp

Conscripted Youth