Freelancing Bass-ics

By Ed Marshall | Associate Fellow

In addition to being a self-employed technical writer specializing in providing documentation for software developers, I am also a freelance musician in the greater Boston, MA, area.

I started playing music in elementary school. Initially, I played tuba but later took up string bass. (The string bass in an orchestra and tuba in a concert perform the same roles in setting the harmonic and rhythmic foundations; both parts are written in bass clef, and both play in the same pitch ranges.)

In college, I majored in music education with tuba and string bass as my major instruments. I got my first experiences as a freelance musician performing with area community orchestras and for area high-school musicals.

I ignored music for several years. During a yearlong layoff in 2001, my interest in music reawakened. I started playing my string bass again after a 15-year hiatus and eventually joined a local community orchestra. As I became more known, I started being called for classical music gigs.

About seven years ago, I started going to weekly jazz jam sessions at a local jazz club, the Acton Jazz Café (AJC). (Jam sessions are where guest musicians play one or more songs with the house band musicians.) For about a year, I was only a listener. At one jam, which I call the “Bass Jam,” there were only other bass players in attendance. They convinced me to play with the house band. This was the rebirth of my jazz playing.

Since then, I have become very active in playing both classical and jazz. About seven years ago, I traded in my string bass from college on a new professional-quality string bass, which has greatly helped my playing and the quality of sound I produce.

One connection to technical communication/STC is that I played bass backing the BosTunes, a Boston STC Community–based vocal group that performed arrangements of classical/pop songs with new lyrics spoofing the life of technical communicators at several STC conferences.

Two years ago, I attended the biennial conference of the International Society of Bassists (ISB) at Penn State University. Two of my former bass teachers attended, one from classical music and one from jazz. While having a photograph taken of the three of us, the one quipped, “Our boy turned out pretty good, didn’t he?” I used my technical writing skills at this conference by writing reports on several lectures/master classes for the organization’s monthly magazine.

I also leverage my technical communication skills by producing a monthly schedule for the Acton Jazz Café. I started doing this a few years ago using the calendar templates included in Microsoft Word and pasting in the various acts from the information provided by the club owner. Often, I have to be creative in revising/condensing the names of the acts to fit into the grid of the calendar.

I find that my music side and my self-employed technical writing side are very complementary. The poise and self-confidence I developed over decades of performing in public were very helpful as I moved into giving professional talks/workshops and being self-employed. I found I never got “stage fright.” Several studies found that there is a high degree of correlation between an aptitude for music and programming (the ability to decode abstract symbols used in music or programming notation into their meaning). This is especially helpful to me as I specialized in providing documentation for software developers.

I now play regularly in a community orchestra, a chamber orchestra, a big band, and various freelance gigs in both the classical and jazz genres. Based on my own music awareness and numerous compliments by other professional musicians in both the jazz and classical genres, I am now considered a very competent bass player and excellent musician in both the jazz and classic genres. Although I will never make a living as a professional musician, music enriches my life greatly. As both an HR person at a longterm client and my father observed, “You like technical writing but music is your passion.”