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and play through them over and over. I plan
my shedding schedule according to what the
schedule is for the gig. Sometimes you don’t
have a lot of time to prepare and you have to
cram. But repetition is key to all of it. I play
with the songs over and over, and if I have to
run errands, I’ll put the songs on in my car
and listen to them on repeat to build that rec-
ognition on top of the muscle memory.
You play electric, upright, and synth bass.
How do you approach each one differently?
Electric is the most comfortable, but de-
pending on what I’m doing and how much
the songs have gotten in my body, it’s not
hard to get to a good place on any of those
instruments. When I shed, I really shed. I’ll
even take lessons before hopping on a gig if I
need to. I’m always learning, and if there’s a
song on an instrument that needs a specific
technique, I’ll study that technique and ab-
sorb it.How much does growing up playing music in
high school and college still inform your playing
today?
I’m super grateful that I have that edu-
cation, because it’s a language I have that I
can use when I’m in situations that warrant
it. In the studio setting it’s helpful to be able
to sight-read and chart music, or to know
how to dial in tones in very specific ways. It
can be an amazing skill set and vocabulary to
have. A lot of these pop/rock gigs don’t in-
volve talking about counterpoint and stuff,
but there are times when it helps to have that
foundation. In college I studied ethnomusi-
cology, which introduced me to all types of
music from around the world. I moved away
from Western music and saw what the rest
of the world was doing, and that opened my
eyes and added so many dimensions to my
musical knowledge. My focus in college was
on Balinese gamelan. My introduction to up-Eva Gardner
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