#ryan monro

WHAT'S BASS PLAYING ALL ABOUT? In the music I play, it's all about gluing the rhythm to the harmony. Or "making the vocals work with what the drums are doing". Fulfil that mission with as many notes as you see tasteful. Don't play any notes for as long as you see tasteful. Do things in unison with other band members as you see tasteful. Follow musical ideas from other band members, or push unblinkingly ahead with your own idea, as you see tasteful. Emulate heroes as you see tasteful. Steal other people's ideas as you see tasteful (that was what everyone did before lawyers came along). Exploit musical cliches (aka quotes, genres) as you see tasteful. Do something unpredictable, as you see tasteful. Do something distasteful, as you see tasteful. Decide for yourself, as you see tasteful, where the line between monotonously repetitive and trance-inducingly repetitive actually lies. Do something you would love if you transcribed it later on, but try not to think about it like that while you're doing it.

WHY DOUBLE BASS? Probably because of The Sharp. They were big in Australia in the early 90s. The double bass was pretty much the fourth member of that band. It went everywhere with them. I remember they presented an award at the ARIAs once. The band walked out on stage, Allan Caitlin had the double bass with him too, and he leant it on and angle and walked halfway up the side and they all posed in this awesome symmetrical rockabilly formation. The crowd went wild and they hadn't played a note. This blew my eleven year old mind. Luckily, years later at high school, our trumpet teacher brought in a double bass that he owned for some reason. That's how I got started.

WHY ELECTRIC BASS? My primary school owned one for some reason. I used to sneak into the music room and play Under Pressure, which I learned by watching John Deacon on my VHS of the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert. Later, in high school, the big band didn't have a bass player. I put my guitar down, picked up the bass, and realised I couldn't read bass clef. I went home and rewrote the whole chart in TAB. Pretty soon bass playing usurped my guitar playing.

DO YOU ENDORSE ANY PARTICULAR MUSICAL GEAR? No. I've come close a few times but the benefits never seem to outweigh the fact that you're letting someone use your name to sell stuff. People should be careful with that. I'm happy to recommend something I like using because I like using it. That would be less genuine if I had an incentive to do so. I really hate it when it feels like somebody is trying to trick my brain into buying something I don't need. This practise is known as advertising, it's a regrettable thing, and it's probably too late for us to stop it. I'd be a hypocrite if I participated in it in any way.

SO WHAT GEAR DO YOU USE? It's not important. Really. Get something that lets you make the sound you want to make, that you can afford.

ARE YOU A VEGETARIAN? WHY? No. I would rather leave that word to people who actually are vegetarians all the time. But I don't eat meat very often. About once a month these days, and it's never chicken. People often assume that means that I'm opposed to the idea of eating meat, or that I think everyone should stop eating it, or that I must be offended by the smell of it cooking, or that I must have less energy than I used to, or something like that. But none of that is true at all. I think meat is awesome. I just think we're eating more of it than we need to. Demand for meat has given the industry an incentive to develop more efficient ways of turning live things into dead things at the supermarket, and the animals have gotten a pretty bad deal out of it. Especially the animals that are small enough to be hung up by their feet on a conveyor belt. Chickens, I'm talking to you. What they go through on the assembly line is not just bad for them; it's bad for you too. If you want to know more I highly recommend reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you don't want to know more, then that might mean you already know there's something in that book you don't want to know about. That's worth thinking about too. For even further reading I would go for The Ethics of Eating by Peter Singer. He's pretty thorough in examining the wide-reaching impact of our actions, but he doesn't really back you into a corner with veganism as the only option. Mind you, ethical ways to eat meat require some pretty drastic lifestyle changes: only eating roadkill, only eating food from dumpsters, etc.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TOUR DIARY? For starters, we hosted it on Myspace. That seemed a future proof solution back in 2005. Secondly, when the monotony of touring starts to get to you, the last thing you want to do in your spare time is sit down and write about it. So I sort of lost track of the tour diary a few tours ago, and never got back into it. But these days attention spans are shorter, so our touring news has found other platforms. We are passing the social media torch around within the band a bit more, which is great. Fans are getting to hear points of view from the other band members too, instead of just what I think about shower heads.

WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR COFFEE BLOG? I realised in early 2010 that there were two things that annoyed me about the internet: people seeming to think others want to hear their opinion, and people volunteering to have technology track their whereabouts at all times. I also realised that my blog was fulfilling both of these. I also noted that it was going to end in tears: if I give some cafe an easily-googlable bad review, guess who they'll blame for not getting enough customers? I decided telling people what I think about stuff was not all that important after all. I hope more people online start doing the same. I'm looking at you, every commenter on Youtube and every reviewer on Urbanspoon and Yelp.