With today's technology, and the simplicity of a lot of musical lines in modern music, the sad part is, you really don't have to be that good to "make it" as a musician. With a few easy bits of information, most of us can pick up an instrument, at least in the studio, and make a passably decent track, even if we really don't know how a particular instrument works. Here are a few pointers to get you by in case you run into this dilemma.
THE BASS CLEF REALLY ISN'T SCARY
If you need a bass line in a song and your bass player suddenly is indisposed, it's not the end of everything. Just do it yourself. A classic trick trivia question is "who was the bass player for The Doors?" They didn't have one, but the keyboard player still has a mean left hand. If you know what the main chord is, you can just play the bass note of the chord, and just drop it an octave or two on a keyboard, a computer, or just pick up the bass if you are a guitarist, and a bass guitar is just the bottom four strings on a guitar, just lower. If you want it a little gutsier, try adding some distortion, sustain or chorus to fatten it up. If you want a little more texture, try different rhythms or fingering a chord and bouncing around to the other notes in the chord as you would on a guitar, but just on the bottom four strings, or using your left hand to finger the chord on a keyboard.
IF YOU CAN DANCE, YOU CAN DRUM
Most musicians can keep a rhythm, whether they admit to it or not. If you aren't the best metronome, use one-many drummers listen to a click track to keep the proper tempo live, anyway-why not use one in the studio? If all else fails, listen to your practice tapes and just program in what you need into a drum machine, then play along to that. Many of us find this easier than using a live drummer, since it won't make mistakes, unless you somehow get a weird program glitch, which is really rare. If all else fails, many band box sorts of sequencers have a bunch of canned drum tracks that you can cut and paste to sound the way you want, even down to the cymbal crashes and a drum solo if you wish. It really is a lot of fun to clamber on a drum throne and try bashing out the intro to "Good Golly Miss Molly"-oops, I mean "Rock and Roll." You may be surprised that you can. I only played a little tympani, bass drum and snare in school band, yet was able to sit in and play drums for my church band, and I'm really not a drummer. The guitarists were surprised that they actually had to turn my mics up to hear me, too-something they weren't used to with their regular drummers at all. Hmm...maybe I should try drumming more-they are more in demand than guitarists...just a thought.
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