My Name is Michel Laredo aka Momo and I’m a Bass Player, Multi-instrumentalist, Producer, Editor and Director.

I have been working in the professional music scene from every angle for over 4 and a half decades.
One thing I know for sure is that forging long term relationships with knowledgeable and trustworthy individuals in this business is the key to longevity in your craft.
Mark Smith from Bass North is one of the world’s rarest resources, his loyalty, and respect of the individuals that come in contact with him in all that is Bass and Bass gear related is so rare and appreciated that I can’t say enough about him and Bass North.
The personal one-on-one attention that I am blessed with as well as how I see him do the same with everyone he comes in contact with truly inspires me.
He is a one on one service master for all Bass Player’s needs and then some.
I have acquired some of my most inspiring gear that delivers the instant mojo I dream of from Mark at Bass North and highly recommend any Bass Player to join Bass forces with him .
Thank you, Mark and Sarah, for all you have done for me and all the players around the globe.
Love and eternal respect
Momo

MY 5 DECADE JOURNEY OF BASS CHASING BY MOMO

I’m going to tell you about my Journey about how and why I fell in love with the Bass guitar and what it gave me back after over 5 decades of chasing the bottom end dream.
I was 14 years old and used to listen to my favorite radio station on my clock radio where they played all the latest and greatest hits of the week in the early 1970s.
I remember hearing the Jackson 5, I want you back and ABC. There was also Sly and The Family Stone, I want to take you higher, Dance to the Music and Everyday people. I started to realize that there was something going on with the Bass in these tracks that really was the beginning of my attraction to the instrument.
Also watching The Midnight Special and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert this really amped up my love for the instrument when I saw Tiran Porter, bassist of the Doobie Brothers playing Long Train Running on a Rickenbacker, I stopped everything I was doing and got a bunch of part time jobs and ran out and bought myself my first Rickenbacker Bass and learned to play that song immediately.
I quickly realized that I was not going to be a cover guy and started writing my own songs on the Bass right away, I seemed to have a knack for writing memorable riffs and creating arrangements on the bass from the very beginning and also having started off on some guitar at 13 years old I was already playing cords and faster types of riffs on the bass that most bassists were just not doing yet.
By the time I was 16, I was in a 3-piece band playing originals and won the battle of the bands at my high school as the Bassist, singer songwriter in a 3-piece rock band.
By 18, I was fully in love with progressive music and Chris Squire from Yes, bands like ELP, The Who, and Led zeppelin’s Bass Players started to really influence me so I joined my first full progressive original band where we wrote 7 min epic type of super complex kinds of songs that till this day, I have no idea how we remembered all those notes!
It was then that I got my first 8 string Bass: a Kramer xl8 Bass, fresh and new and it blew my mind as well as anyone who saw and heard it.
Working with that band taught me so much about non-standard Bass playing, as well as mind and muscle memory, since none of us read music and only had a recording tape ghetto blaster to record ourselves with, or we would have never remembered all those awesome jams we turned into our actual original songs.
Strangely enough it is still how I do things today when I write my Bass songs and lines in a one take jam style where I then actually have to relearn myself after the one take recordings I do so often.
This Bass Journey has made me meet so many great people and have so many awesome experiences like meeting my friend Enzo of over 45 years who also happens to be a friend of Mark Smith at Bass North today. How wild is that but Enzo and I used to trade exotic and never before seen Basses all the time after that progressive band!
Insane old fenders, and Musicman Basses, some of the very first Spector Basses ever made to one of a kind high end handmade instrument.
I feel so lucky to have experienced and owned such wonderful music inspiring basses from such a young age and when it was all brand-new innovational times and still totally fresh with possibilities that haven’t happened yet.
Because I played Bass, and learned how to write and arrange, as well as produce and work with so many people in the industry for the love of music and its advancement for my career,
So many doors opened up just because of this Bass journey that brought me to so many other very important phases of my life.
For 5 years I became a major touring and booking agent, thanks to that I met my soulmate and my wife of 40 years on a subway ride to work.
When that job was over my wife and I became jingle and song writers and started producing other artists and working full time in various recording studios.
We also started our own personal music projects and won: Songwriter of the year as well as other song writing contests in Europe.
All this because of my love for Bass and all the things it led me to out of the love of chasing Bass and music.
It also brought me to head the A&R department for Ubisoft, one of the world biggest game companies where I got to write soundtracks, and direct multimillion dollar projects which then added even more skillsets to the tool box that would create our independence as self-running artists.
My wife Crila would then become a world class photographer in a very short time working with all the major magazines and artists as well as being endorsed by Canon cameras.
I then embraced the art of digital filming, directing and editing and won director and editor of the year for a film production company after only doing a few videos.
The journey kept evolving in music and bass land when I met my dear friend Matt Eichen from Musicvox guitars where several years after our meeting he blessed me with my signature Momo 8 and 12 string Basses.
It is at this point where I really realized the power and possibilities of what I could do as a solo Bass Player using this type of multiple string instrument.
This brought me to a whole new level of people through the power of the internet, magazine covers, bass articles, becoming a prominent interviewer on Bass Musician Magazine interviewing some of the world’s Best Bass Players from Alain Caron to Bill Sheehan to the great Brandino.
It also brought me to getting love from companies like Darkglass, Dingwall, TWA , Morley and Tech 21 and meeting the great Mark Smith from Bass North all because of my love of bass and where it took me throughout my life.
Presently I am working on a really unique approach for a course on writing, producing and presenting yourself on the web as a Bass Player that will be announced in the next few months.
It is totally different from anything else that is out there today and is a roundup of everything I taught myself over 5 decades of what the Bass has blessed me with in opportunities as well as my very own approach to working and learning at the speed of your heart and dreams and making it happen in record time.
I am also putting together a really cool duo with my wife Crila that is basically just bass and drums and her on vocals and a few guitars here and there, some really cool stuff that we are very excited for people to hear.
I want to thank the Bass guitar for all that it has shown and given to me throughout my life , it has shown me love, it has given me discipline, it has been a major calling card for some of my biggest opportunities as well as meeting some of the greatest most talented people on earth and some of my true lifelong friends and partners that I would have never been able to be part of without you!!!!! I love you Bass and will thank you eternally!!!!!
Momo

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