LeftyBassist.com

I was just wondering, what do you guys do when you're not playing bass or wasting time you could have spent playing bass on this great site? Coming here quite often, it kind of feels as if I know you guys, and yet we know so little about eachother (though some of us are also Facebook friends).

I'll kick it off. I work as an environmental and geotechnical field engineer for a mid-size consultancy bureau here in the Netherlands. I'm a bachelor in environmental sciences, and through various internships during my studies, ended up specializing in soil and groundwater. I started as a consultant, but gradually discovered the office isn't the right place for me so now I spend my workdays outdoors for most of the time. My work mainly includes conducting soil surveys (by manually drilling into the soil with a hand auger and taking samples of layers, placing monitoring wells and sampling the groundwater) and supervising soil remediation projects. Our company's core business, however, is in soil mechanics and foundation engineering. For this, we have several CPT trucks (cone penetration testing) for testing the bearing capacity of soils for up to 60 metres deep. I can operate these as well, but unfortunately I don't have a truck driving license! Here's one of our CPT trucks on a harbour site in Dunkerque, France.

Very cool, Jeroen!

Well, I guess you all might as well know it: I'm a professional nerd. I'm a patent attorney with a large international firm. My largest client is Google, and I do a lot of patents for their data center and optical networking technology. I also work for some startups and other smaller companies, and I like that mix.

Before law school I was an electrical engineer designing scientific instruments: mass spectrometers and magnetic resonance imagers. I applied to law school when my engineering career stalled and I realized I didn't love engineering in practice the way I loved it in school and as a hobby.

But I got into electronics through music. After high school I earned a two-year degree in "recording arts". I wasn't much of a musician, having only been in lame school bands and only taking a handful of proper lessons, but I discovered I was really good with the gear, both inside and out. I spent about a year looking for paid work in the industry while working various s--- jobs, and applied to engineering school as a fallback. The rest, as they say,...

My job doesn't lend itself to cool pictures, but here's one of me doing my favorite thing:


Picture is a few years old, though. I'm waiting for my kids to get old enough to join me in the mountains. But I can already tell that my daughter has the bug:

Man, rock climbing! That looks fun, never tried it. I’ve conquered my fear of heights through mountain biking though so I need to give climbing a shot someday.

Right out of college I worked for one company for 30 years, I was an RF engineer initially, then in late 80's moved to the newly formed Optics Group. Then I became a Product Manager for several years before accepting a position managing the Technical Support Team. My favorite moments are when I installed the first HDTV system at Viacom in NYC at the MTV building (1998) as well as visiting ESPN and getting a tour of the facility and sitting at the desk of Sports Center. Over the 30 years I was able to incorporate music into work by playing in the company band and performing with other great musicians for Sales Conferences and All Hands Meetings as well as Cable Shows. I performed in San Diego (deck of the USS Midway), Las Vegas (Aladdin Hotel) and Hard Rock Cafe Philly. After an amazing run at General Instrument then purchased by Motorola, then purchased by Google then sold to ARRIS I was impacted by a work force reduction and took a position at Comcast where I am building up my new musical connections.

I'm a instrumentmaker at the Leiden University at the Physics department. I design, build, modify and maintain high-tech laboratory equipment.
I really like this job and it pays well enough to allow me to only work for four days a week and finance my life and hobby's.

Being a instrumentmaker has nothing to do with musical instruments, making musical instrument is just a hobby.

A part for a lab setup I designed and fabricated.

I want your job, blablas.

And some of your basses.

But not all of your basses, of course. Because that would be excessive

Climbing is great. It's funny, I've watched climbing get crazy popular while mountain biking seems to be on the wane. Trails that were packed in the early 2000s before I left New England are nicely sparse since I returned. But the crags where I used to spend my summers are total shit shows now.

Yeah man, the biking trails here have just enough riders on them. Cool meeting people there, but even cooler when you have more trail to yourself & your buddies

Meet people? You must ride a lot slower than I do

Haha!

You guys have some very cool jobs, especially blablas. Now I understand how you can build a bass with such precision.

Anyway hi I'm a young cat just trying to play bass a lot, I packed up everything I own (mostly bass gear ) and drove from Wisconsin to Los Angeles 9 months ago and two months ago quit my delivery job in favor of playing more paying gigs. I like playing live plenty but want to get in on the recording session game once I've paid my dues. I'm a "member" of 7 or 8 bands and doing other freelance sub work as well.

Awesome! I knew Leiden University has some skilled craftsmen from one of the guitarists in my band, who got his Chemistry PhD there. He would often talk about the skill of his faculty's glass blowers. I didn't know Physics had craftsmen too!

I know all of these glass blowers and in the past have worked together with them on several projects.
This glass workshop has been closed at the chemistry department, nowadays most of the glass-work can be bought, however there are still a few glass blowers around, they are housed inside the 'Instrument Makers School' (next door to us) primarily as teachers but if there is a need for specialized glass-work there is an agreement they can still do this for us.

I'm an author. I've shared some of my projects here. I just completed my latest book about an older couple in Georgia trying to survive an invasion by Russia and North Korea.
My agent is pitching the screenplay to Denzel. It's a tough racket to be in, for sure, but I love it. I'm also the Director of Communications for a non-profit, which keeps me busy.
I have a degree in English, Literature and Culture from USF, St. Pete.

This is my website:

http://www.suicidalflower.com/

And I'm in a cover band called BigTimeVIPs. There's some video here - not so good - of a couple open mics we played.
In the second video you can see me playing my piccolo bass if you've never heard one before.

http://www.bigtimevips.com/sights--sounds.html

Nice to call you all my friends!

pete

I wish you the best of luck, man!

When I was 25, I packed my Honda and move from Worcester MA to San Francisco (mostly just because Worcester sucked). I drove to a motel by the airport and lived there until I found a roommate--eventually I found a job, met some climbing partners, and started spending weekends in the hills (see above picture).

Breaking out of that rut and striking out on my own was the second best decision I ever made. The first best decision, of course, was marrying my wife, even though she dragged me kicking and screaming back to New England. My fault for moving 3,000 miles away only to fall for a girl who grew up a few towns over.

I currently work as a Water Systems Technician for a small family owned business. When people live off the city water grid they need their own source of water and also their own way of water disposal and treatment. My co-workers and I put in new systems and also travel around and perform routine maintenance. Sometimes it's gravy, and sometimes it can get really dirty (read stinky) and physical. The upside, is that I live in Oregon, and since our customers live outside of towns and cities, I get to see lots of beautiful country and go back into some areas and see properties etc that I would otherwise never get to see. Being outside in the fresh air surrounded by nice scenery has sort of a calming and stress-reducing effect.

Before this current gig, I was a welder and steel fabricator for almost 10 years. I'd like to think I"m pretty good at it, but was getting tired of spending my existence inside of a loud, smokey, shop. I needed to try something that got me moving around a little more.

I moved to Oregon from Wisconsin about 8 years ago where I was born and raised. I have a bachelor of science in criminal justice with with a minor in philosophy from Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. If I could do it all over again I would have majored in something with music, unbeknownst to my naive self, I attended one of the better Liberal Arts Universities in that area but had better choose a "real" major because music is a hobby not a job. Anyway, its all good. I have a nice house and a beautiful wife with our first baby on the way next spring. I'm currently in 3 "bands": a kind of radio rock band with a touch of jam-band influence, a psyche-doom project, and I recently got on board with a deathened black metal band. A gentlemen an hour north of me released an album on his own, and he recruited us to join him and be the band behind the album. I'm really excited about the newest project. The music is really well done and hopefully we can do some shows, once we learn the material and you never know. My music endeavors are fairly diverse lately, so I have an excuse to use all types of different gear and basses, which is great, because I love gear just as much as playing! Here is a link to the newest project: https://undoctrinate.bandcamp.com/album/innate-2

[Anyway hi I'm a young cat just trying to play bass a lot, I packed up everything I own (mostly bass gear ) and drove from Wisconsin to Los Angeles 9 months ago and two months ago quit my delivery job in favor of playing more paying gigs. I like playing live plenty but want to get in on the recording session game once I've paid my dues. I'm a "member" of 7 or 8 bands and doing other freelance sub work as well.]

Great story, hang in there! I learned to play bass as my friend was learning guitar. After High School I went to College and he did what you are doing right now with the same attitude with the guitar. He got his big break with Christina Aguilera around 2000 and has taken off from there. Check out https://www.facebook.com/michael.f.herring

The best part of his story is that in March I took my daughter to see Idena Menzel as Fish was touring with her, after the show we hung out in the lobby and my daughter thought (just for a minute) that I was a cool dad as I knew the guitar for the show!

I spent most of my 24 year Air Force career as a Combat Engineer in one or the other of these Squadrons (once they've got you, they don't like to let you go);

After I retired, I worked for a big Geotechnical company for a while. But, I was tired of dirt, weather, and construction sites, so I decided to get an indoor job, For the last 21 years (almost to the day, in fact)', I've been armed Security for a big bank's Central Cash Vault. I mostly sit at this console, and let people and armored tricks in and out. Very peaceful; just the job for an old retired GI...

After spending 15 long and horribly soul-sucking years in the corporate world as a regional operation manager I dropped everything and bought a house in Tahoe where I am a ski instructor/event planner/musician/ski bum/moutain climber/wine connoisseur. I have been buying more outdoor gear than music instruments.

I did a fair bit of North/South Tahoe climbing when I lived in the Bay Area. Donner Summit, Phantom Spires, Sugarloaf, Lover's Leap... Such amazing places. Here's one of my favorites from those years (my buddy Mark):