I happen to have been listening to a few Boston tracks recently, and I’m wondering if the bass lines were usually played by a real bass guitar or on a keyboard? There are a few very busy parts often involving rapid double notes which don’t feel intuitive to me (as an actual bass player).
Anyone have any thoughts, or better, info about the recording process?
From what I can tell, Tom was just a really good bass player with a bit of an idiosyncratic style.
Found elsewhere in a discussion of the bass tracks on the first album.
Much of the bass was done by Tom with modified EB-0 bass and a pick. Keep in mind I was doing this before people started posting tabs on the internet and YouTube. To learn 10 seconds of a song I had spend a hour listing and listing to figure what Tom was doing.
I can certainly believe a pick. Doesn’t immediately sound like a stock EB0, but ‘modified’ covers a lot of ground if we’re talking about Tom Scholz… 
I can buy into him using a pick, though I’ve seen a couple bar bands perform Foreplay/Long Time and the bass was played as usual.
Yet why “much of the bass”. Tom Scholz produced the entire first album in his basement over several years. Brad Delp’s vocals and some real good fortune in having an A&E guy from Epic hear them in passing, then trying to assemble a band since Tom couldn’t play everything live all at once made the band.
An MIT engineer who’s day job was working at Polaroid (yet he did not invent the SX-70, one of my favorite cameras) who made one of Rock’s greatest debut albums. And they are not in the (rolling stone magazine) Hall of Fame?
I have little doubt that he played all the bass lines. Just wondering about the instrument. He is obviously also a skilled keyboard player and there are quite a few instances of keyboard bass in rock… Ray Manzarek, for example.
To my ear, some of the bass lines sound like something which falls more easily under the fingers on keyboard rather than electric bass, that’s all…
Q: How many bass players does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Zero. The keyboard player can do it with their left hand.
–RS, bass player
As to the OP, maybe the parts feel counterintuitive because he’s really a guitar and keyboard player, even if the parts are actually played on a bass?
Rick Beato has a few Boston videos. I’m not going to pick through them, but in this one, at 3:25, he mentions that Tom Scholz plays bass on the whole album. But that’s as far as I made it into the video, so if he expanded on that later, or in a different video, and mentions the use of a keyboard, I didn’t get that far. In any case, here’s the video:
Here’s another Rick Beato video where he mentions Tom playing the bass, starting at 4:09:
Can you point out what songs and where? Rapid double notes to me sounds easier on bass than keyboard, depending on what you mean by the phrase. (Spoken as a keyboard player.) I’ve never heard of keyboard bass being used on their albums, and keyboard bass usually has a sound pretty distinct from real bass (one of many reasons I hate the Doors – I don’t like that keybass sound.)
It’s more a subliminal impression than anything else at the moment… I’ll hear a part go past and momentarily think: that doesn’t sound like something I’d have played…
I’ll have a more critical listen & maybe run a few things through a stem separator to try to pick out a few specific examples….
Q: What’s the difference between a bass player and a large pepperoni pizza?
A: The pizza can feed a family of four.
Ah, those days in the 80s when all the bass was played on synths! Not much demand for us then…
Actually in my recording work these days I find I’m playing a lot more bass parts on keys, especially for arrangements needing an acoustic bass. Don’t have one, it would hardly fit in my home studio anyway…
Haha! That’s a good one!
Yeah, I used to play some keys back then and all I tried to do was play bass parts. I should have realized I was a bass player at heart, but instead waited several decades to pick up the bass.
In fact now that I listen closely to some Boston songs again, I’m not getting the impression so much.
There must have been just one or two passages in a couple of songs which struck me that way, but I haven’t really located them yet. Fallibility of memory and all that…
If I recall, on the beginning of “Foreplay/Long Time”, it sounds like a clavinet is playing the walking bass part, but I could be mistaken.
Now, how do you get a bass player off of your front door step?
Pay for the pizza.
Oh, yes, that’s unmistakable. Not sure if it was an actual clavinet or a synthesized sound, but that part was definitely played on keys.
Slept through a boring concert of theirs once, and they had a bassist. Seemed they pretty much desired to replicate the album sound. If that was their goal, and if they did not use a bass on the album, I’d think they would have had a keyboard player on stage.
Tho, at one point, I recall a bunch of organ pipes appearing in the background. Was supposed to be dramatic. No recollection of the song or orchestration.
Not necessarily. The Stones have keys on a lot of their tracks, but poor Ian Stewart was never a ‘real Stone’, supposedly because he looked too straight? I think they have always kept any keyboard player offstage at concerts?
I thought Billy Preston toured with them a bit. But never a huge Stones fan. And not sure they hhew so closely to their recordings in concert as I recall Boston did. (One of the most uninspiring of the several hundreds of concerts I’ve seen.)
What do you call a Bass player without a girlfriend?
Homeless.
I tried to learn to play. I failed. Not good with stringed instruments.
Here is an example. It’s the sort of dum-dum-dum-dum-diddle_um-dum-dum phrase that he tends to use rather often. Just not something I would play. Though listening to the separated tracks, I would now conclude it’s definitely a real bass, not a keyboard.
This is an experiment using vocaroo. I don’t know if it will work…