"If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object"
About this Quote
Bass is the one instrument that turns sound into something you can almost touch, and Colin Greenwood knows it. In a single, offhand line, he captures the weird intimacy of modern music-making: the moment when low end stops being felt in the chest and starts being seen on a screen. That "warm curvy" waveform isn’t just a tech observation. It’s a confession about how editing changes musicianship. You’re no longer just listening for groove; you’re sculpting it visually, like a designer pushing pixels into place.
The sly charge is in the gendered metaphor. Calling the bassline a "sort of feminine object" isn’t meant as a grand thesis, but it reveals how quickly we reach for bodily language when music becomes abstracted into data. Bass has long been coded as physical, sensual, even maternal - the foundation you lean on without always noticing. Greenwood’s phrasing smuggles that history into the sterile space of a DAW: even in the hyper-rational world of editing grids and plug-ins, the low frequencies still invite desire, comfort, and anthropomorphism.
Context matters: Greenwood comes from a band that treats texture and atmosphere as composition, not decoration. For musicians like him, editing isn’t cleanup; it’s writing. The line lands because it’s funny and a little incriminating, pointing to the way technology makes us talk about sound like bodies - and bodies like shapes we can control.
The sly charge is in the gendered metaphor. Calling the bassline a "sort of feminine object" isn’t meant as a grand thesis, but it reveals how quickly we reach for bodily language when music becomes abstracted into data. Bass has long been coded as physical, sensual, even maternal - the foundation you lean on without always noticing. Greenwood’s phrasing smuggles that history into the sterile space of a DAW: even in the hyper-rational world of editing grids and plug-ins, the low frequencies still invite desire, comfort, and anthropomorphism.
Context matters: Greenwood comes from a band that treats texture and atmosphere as composition, not decoration. For musicians like him, editing isn’t cleanup; it’s writing. The line lands because it’s funny and a little incriminating, pointing to the way technology makes us talk about sound like bodies - and bodies like shapes we can control.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|
More Quotes by Colin
Add to List
