Nate Mendel Biography
Nate Mendel born Nathan Gregor Mendel is an American musician for the bands Foo Fighters, The Jealous Sound, Sunny Day Real Estate, and the Fire Theft. He announced that he is the singer, songwriter, and guitarist for his new project, Lieutenant in 2015.
Mendel was interested in music from his tender age and he first played the violin as his first musical instrument. Mendel grew fond of rock music and joined a band at the age of 13. His friend suggested that he should play the bass guitar.
Nate Mendel Age
The well-known guitarist for many bands and in the rock industry was born on 2 December 1968 in Richland, Washington, United States. As of 2018, he is 50 years old.
Nate Mendel Height
Nate has an average standing height of 5 feet 8 inches tall. Mendel’s standing height may be equivalent to 1.73 meters tall.
Nate Mendel Family
There is no provided information about his family background as he maintains a low profile about his personal life. This information will soon be updated.
You can also read about Nate Jones
Nate Mendel Wife
In September 2011 it was reported by Billboard.biz that Mendel was dating Sub Pop publicist and director of marketing, Kate Jackson. They married on October 2014.
Nate Mendel Net Worth
He is from Richland. Bassist and one of the original members of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Foo Fighters who also played in Sunny Day Real Estate. On-Net Worth Stats, Nate Mendel is a member of guitarists and popular celebrities. His estimated net worth ranges from $ 100,000 to $1 million
Nate Mendel Bass|Nate Mendel P Bass Review|Nate Mendel Fender Bass
After a bit of research, I decided on a Fender Nate Mendel Precision. I liked that the bass has an undersized nut (for a P), 7.25 radius, the flat/thin neck profile, and the 70’s vintage look/vibe. I scored one on a Black Friday deal for 15% off. It brought me out of pocket down to $750 ($900 retail).
Nate Mendel Gear
Due to his longstanding affinity with his original 1971 bass, Mendel and Fender collaborated in 2012 to replicate the instrument in the form of the Fender Nate Mendel Signature Precision Bass. Featuring a powerful Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound pickup and a Badass II bridge, the Nate Mendel P-Bass is the ultimate rock n’ roll workhorse, perfectly complementing Mendel’s punchy downstroke playing style. In the above video, Mendel discusses the signature instrument, labeling the final result as “iconic”.
Nate Mendel Bass Rig
While recording the seventh Foo Fighters LP Wasting Light, Mendel made the switch to a Lakland Bob Glaub signature bass, telling Bass Player Magazine in 2011 that the sonic characteristics of the bass better suited the analog vibe of the record. “I played all of Wasting Light on a Lakland. We tried a few different basses, but we found the sound that worked best. We’d change the EQ to get the bass to fit in the mix.” In addition, Mendel occasionally plays a Lakland for songs tuned to Drop D on tour, as well as appearing with one in the video for ‘The Pretender’.
Nate Mendel Twins
Footage has emerged of the recent Foo Fighters show that saw Jane’s Addiction bassist Chris Chaney standing in for Nate Mendel after he became a father to twin girls.
Nate Mendel Bass Review
Throughout a long career that started with hardcore punk and flourished first with Sunny Day Real Estate and then the Foo Fighters, there has really only been one main instrument for melodic yet hard-hitting bassist Nate Mendel-his 1971 Precision. Fender now brings you the Nate Mendel P Bass, modeled after his beloved, battle-hardened instrument.
The Nate Mendel P Bass shares the same subtly idiosyncratic and distinctive features as the original, with special body contours, extra-slim neck, and nut width, a lightly worn Candy Apple Red finish with a black pickguard, a powerful Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound split single-coil pickup, Fender Hi-Mass Bridge bridge for rock-solid sustain and stability, and Mendel’s signature on the headstock. It also comes with a spare neck plate engraved with a special hybrid Foo Fighters/Fender logo and a deluxe gig bag.
Nate Mendel Foo Fighters
Just prior to Sunny Day Real Estate disbanding in 1995, Mendel and Goldsmith were invited by Dave Grohl to join his band, the Foo Fighters, during the week of Halloween in late October 1994. He has remained a bandmember ever since, being one of the only original members in the Foo Fighters current line-up along with Grohl and former Nirvana live guitarist Pat Smear.
Although Sunny Day Real Estate reunited for two more albums (How It Feels to Be Something On and The Rising Tide), he stayed with the Foo Fighters, in Sunny Day Real Estate, he was replaced by Jeff Palmer, and Palmer was replaced by Joey Skyward, when Skyward left the band, Jeremy Enigk (lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist, and keyboardist) moved to the bass.
After Sunny Day Real Estate disbanded once more, he joined with other Sunny Day Real Estate members Jeremy Enigk and William Goldsmith to form The Fire Theft, who released a self-titled album in 2003. In 2001, he played with Juno.
Mendel at first considered the bass a melodic instrument and thus liked to input more personality in his bass parts. Bass Player described Mendel’s style in Sunny Day Real Estate as “heavy-handed and fleet-footed, rooted in punk rock but prone to melodic flights that encircled the band’s airy arrangements”, and Mendel added that in his first years of the Foo Fighters he tried “to make these songs as complicated as I could and put as much bass on there as possible”.
He eventually changed his priorities to the more traditional bass style where the instrument acts as “the bridge between the melodic element and the percussion”, saying that he “alter[ed] the way I play bass so it works in this band, so I can support Dave’s songs as best as possible.”
The priorities he learned to take with his playing was to “play tight and lock better with the drums” adding that when Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins decide to redo the drum tracks, at times Mendel would have to remake his whole basslines.
Mendel is known to use a pick almost exclusively. His preferred style was alternate picking, but on the fifth Foo Fighters album, In Your Honor, he started to employ down picking because “with this kind of music, you need the consistency and percussive sound you get from playing with downstrokes.” For the acoustic shows, Mendel played fingerstyle.
Mendel also plays Lakland basses, particularly the Bob Glaub Signature, one of which was employed on the Foo Fighters’ seventh album, Wasting Light. He uses a Fulltone Bassdrive pedal, though Mendel downsized the usage of effects pedals as the Foo Fighters rose its number of musicians –
“Now that we have three guitar players, there’s a lot of distortion going on, so I try to keep it clean and stay in line with the kick drum. That way, I know that even if we’re playing a big echoey venue, at least the bass will come across with some bite and precision.”
He also regularly contributes to the official Foo Fighters blog. At the Foo Fighters Oklahoma City, Oklahoma show on September 30, 2015, Dave Grohl introduced the band and stated that Nate flew home for the birth of his Son, Cormac Bloodmoon Mendel, and back the next day to be in Oklahoma City to play the show.
Nate Mendel Precision
Nate Mendel House
Four years ago, musician Nate Mendel bought a house in the Los Angeles hills surrounded by a scrappy lawn and a few big trees. It sat wide open to the street, and an energy-guzzling swimming pool swallowed much of its half-acre lot.
But the 5,000-square-foot house itself was a gem, a low-slung ranch built in 1953 and untouched since. Mendel, bass player for the often-touring post-grunge band the Foo Fighters, felt certain it could be transformed into a welcoming home base. While its restorative mountain and valley views were already in place, the garden needed major help.
Mendel has a Northwesterner’s reverence for woodlands and a SoCal transplant’s appreciation of sunny, arid Los Angeles. As the son of a gardening dad, Mendel “energetically dug holes” as a child in eastern Washington, and he wanted his 8-year-old son, Noah, to have the same experience with lots of play space that was easy to maintain and didn’t overtax the environment.
When he works at home — in the music studio/office/guest pavilion designed by architects Elissa Scrafano and Gus Duffy, who also renovated the house — Mendel needs to wander outside for inspiration. Before a single plant went in, Mendel and landscape architect Mark Tessier spent hours walking the long, narrow lot, discussing options.
“Mark was good at tactfully shooting down my unworkable ideas,” Mendel remembers, smiling. “Then he’d tell me what would work and still capture the feeling I was after.”
Both saw the house’s siting as a guide. Facing the street to the southwest and the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast, it suggested two distinct outside spaces, one woodsy and sheltered, the other bright and panoramic, with a lawn surrounding the pool.
Doors and windows on the home’s four sides dictated the scale and location of garden zones. The kitchen now overlooks a spacious covered lounge, a media room links to the swimming pool, and a playroom opens onto a sitting porch that’s cool on blazing afternoons.
The new gardens, created by Tessier and his associate Joshua Rosen, offer a sequence of scenes, including a sun-dappled forest walk, a Valencia orange grove that recalls the valley’s agrarian past, and a gathering spot topped with angel’s trumpet (Brugmansia).
A hedge of Japanese blueberry (Elaeocarpus decipiens) provides privacy on the street side, where a translucent gate opens onto a splashing fountain, and a bridge to the front door spans a sunken bed of succulents in lieu of a pond. “The succulents look exotic because of how they’re treated,” says Tessier. “And the sound of water enhances the illusion of a pond, which would have demanded more resources.”
To keep within Mendel’s eco-wise parameters, Tessier fit a new 30- by the 15-foot solar-heated saltwater pool into the old pool’s larger frame, which was less expensive and waste-producing than total demolition. He preserved existing trees: coast lives oak (Quercus agrifolia), Brazilian pepper tree (Schinus terebinthifolius), and sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), all suited to Los Angeles’ climate. And for lushness, he planted the front garden’s “woods” with tough California sycamores (Platanus racemosa) that echo the gray, green, and bronze color palette indoors. These Tessier underplanted with low-maintenance ornamental grasses (Carex glauca and Leymus condensatus ‘Canyon Prince’) and creeping germander (Teucrium chamaedrys ‘Prostratum’), the Mediterranean with dark-green leaves that belie its drought-tolerance.
With input from Mendel, Tessier kept the plant list short, massing their choices into uncluttered, limited-variety swaths that repeat from garden to garden but also emphasize naturalness. “We searched high and low for sycamores with quirky forms, leaning or multitrunked, the orphans no one wanted, so they’d look as if they’d grown here from seed,” says Tessier. He placed the trees at random-feeling intervals, which, again, suggested nature’s hand.
A series of paths draw a circuit around the house, their materials varying from earthy decomposed granite to concrete, sometimes seamed with grass. One formal landscape element — the grid of juice-orange trees — serves as a transition between the house and the multipurpose pavilion, where Mendel and his girlfriend, Kate Jackson, a music publicist and artists’ manager, spend in-town workdays. “At first,” Mendel says, “the idea seemed pretentious, but then I thought, ‘Hmm, I could go running and pick the oranges on my way back for breakfast!’”
Now that the garden is done, says Jackson, they use every section of it when Mendel isn’t touring, whether that’s to host Noah’s friends for pool days or drink wine with their friends around the lounge’s fire pit. Mostly, though, says Jackson: “When we’re in the garden, Nate’s in relaxation/zone-out mode. I’ll ask him, ‘What’re you thinking about?’ He always answers, ‘Music.’”
Nate Mendel Signature
Nate Mendel Bass Neck
Description: Official Fender Nate Mendel Precision Bass Neck & Tuners- Maple w/ Rosewood Fingerboard- Slim “C” ’71 Shape- 7.25″ Radius (184.1 mm)- 20 Medium Jumbo Frets- 34″ Scale Length (864 mm)- 1.615″ Width at Nut (41.02 mm)- Road Worn Nitrocellulose Lacquer Finish- Genuine Fender
Condition: Mint (Road Worn)
Year: 2016
Serial #: MX16766830
Country/Make: Mexico
Comments: You are looking at a wonderful Mint Fender Nate Mendel (of Foo Fighters) Precision Bass neck & tuners! This is a fantastic Fender model featuring a slim “C” shape based on his ’71 P Bass and lightly road worn nitro lacquer finish for the perfect relic appeal. The fingerboard, headstock, and back of the neck are perfectly aged by Fender- frets are like new. It is also straight as an arrow w/ truss rod in perfect condition. Buy it today!
Product Specs
Condition: Mint (Used)
Brand Fender
Model Nate Mendel Precision P BASS NECK + TUNERS Parts Slim 71 “C” Nitro
Finish Finish
Categories Necks
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Nate Mendel Strings|Nate Mendel Interview
Nate Mendel with the Foo Fighters
From his proto-emo explorations with Sunny Day Real Estate to his post-grunge grooves with the Foo Fighters, Nate Mendel has learned loads about the dominant traits of great rock bass playing. Pay attention, kids.
How did you first come to play bass?
When I was 13 or 14 I had a friend who played guitar. He got it into his head that we should start a band. He suggested I play bass, and I said, “Okay, that sounds good!” That was at a time when I was first starting to go out and buy my own records and form my own taste. I was really into the Police—especially Ghost in the Machine [A&M, 1981].
How did you go about learning to play?
I knew a guy who played in a local band, and I took a couple of lessons with him. But then I just started to experiment and figure things out on my own. All through high school, I played in punk rock bands— mostly in a band called Diddley Squat. We did a couple of tours around the country in a van. It was part of the punk rock scene, so it was do-it-yourself on a pretty small scale, but it was a lot of fun.
After that, I moved to Seattle and joined Christ On A Crutch, another punk rock group that did a lot of touring. I was in the band for three or four years, and at the tail end, I was becoming more enthusiastic about hardcore punk rock and wanting to play more intricate, interesting music. That’s when I formed Sunny Day Real Estate.
Which bands were making a mark on you?
My musical education was pretty limited— it was all hardcore punk rock, like Minor Threat, Black Flag, and Bad Brains. Instead of studying the bass playing of someone like John Entwistle, which would have given me a foundation on how to play, I just wanted to play a lot of notes really fast. That was pretty much the only goal.
At that point, how did you understand your role as a bass player, and how did you go about playing that role in Sunny Day Real Estate?
When we got together, we were influenced by the music that was coming out of the Washington D.C. hardcore scene, especially bands like Rites Of Spring and Hayden. At the time, people were becoming more experimental within underground music, and not just thrashing out hardcore songs. That’s what we were listening to, but we didn’t sit down and strategize the kind of music we were going to play. We just got in a room and started making noise.
Some of the arrangements worked out well and may seem fairly sophisticated, but it was really just trial and error. It wasn’t developed to a point where I would have understood my role in the band, per se. In retrospect, I can look back and realize what an incredible opportunity it was as somebody forming my own identity as a player because William Goldsmith was an incredible drummer—so passionate and so creative. We really played off each other. If he did something cool on the drums, I would try to come up with something that accentuated that. He’d hear me fiddling around with a part and he would do the same.
The writing was a labor-intensive process, but it worked out well. We wouldn’t look at the song as a whole; we’d play one part of a song for an hour, and then somebody would take it off into another direction. It was jam-oriented, as opposed to being a situation where a songwriter would come up with a chord structure and then bring it to the band. We had two guitar players who liked to play intertwined guitar parts, so it wasn’t always clear what the root chord was. So I had a lot of freedom to come up with interesting bass lines.
How did you come to play with the Foo Fighters?
Dave Grohl recorded what turned out to be the first Foo Fighters record in early 1994; Sunny Day broke up later that year. Dave’s tape was circulating around town, and I knew there might be an opportunity to try out for the band. So I started listening to it and playing along. From my perspective at the time, the music seemed rudimentary; I wasn’t mature enough as a musician to know that a well-structured pop song should be simple.
At any rate, I was excited to maybe have an opportunity to make these songs as complicated as I could and put as much bass on there as possible because that’s all I heard. Basically, I came into the band wholly unprepared to play in it. You can kind of hear that on the first few records, where I’m trying to inject as much of my personality as I possibly could. Since then, I’ve realized that what I need to do is alter the way I play bass so it works in this band, so I can support Dave’s songs as best as possible.
How has that approach changed the way you play?
I’ve always played with a pick, but up until the fifth Foo Fighters record, I never played downstrokes—I would alternate my picking. But with this kind of music, you need the consistency and percussive sound you get from playing with downstrokes. The other thing I’ve done is to learn how to play tight and lock better with the drums. It comes down to subtlety and nuance; that was something I didn’t grasp early on.
On the live album Skin and Bones, the band was going for a stripped-down acoustic sound. How did you change your playing to adapt?
I downsized to a combo amp, but it didn’t change the sound much. I tried to play more fingerstyle. I wasn’t comfortable with that at all at the beginning of that tour, but by the end, I had become fairly proficient at it.
You formed the Fire Theft in 2001. How was it different from what you were doing at the time with the Foo Fighters?
I did that with William and Jeremy from Sunny Day Real Estate, and it was a more fluid indie rock as opposed to the heavier, pop-oriented rock that the Foo Fighters did. Those guys had started working on a record, and about halfway through the process, they brought me into it. By then, the basic structure was pretty well ironed out for most of the songs.
When we were doing Sunny Day Real Estate, it was a bunch of guys in a room hashing it out. But by this point, Jeremy had become a more confident and mature musician, and he was very much the key songwriter. There was still the freedom to play whatever I felt like, and there was room to add different melodic elements in that band. Stylistically, it fell somewhere in between early Sunny Day Real Estate and the Foo Fighters.
When the Foo Fighters played the VH1 Rock Honors show in 2008, you took on two songs by the Who: “Young Man Blues” and “Bargain.” How did you approach recreating John Entwistle’s parts?
That was a tough one because you can’t replicate what he did unless you spend hours and hours figuring out his gear, his technique, etc. Basically, I just listened to the records, and I tried to get as close as possible to playing what he played. My basic goal was to keep up and to not make a total ass out of myself. As the Foo Fighters have had opportunities to play shows like the VH1 Rock Honors, we’ve had a few of these kinds of challenges thrown our way. I always feel like I’m playing catch-up because I’m not a particularly special musician. But I’ve gotten pretty good at thinking on my feet.
To mark this year’s Record Store Day on April 16, the Foo Fighters released Medium Rare, a limited-edition compilation of cover tunes you’ve done over the years. Are there any particular covers you feel most at home playing?
You basically form your identity as a musician when you’re young, and for me, that meant playing in Sunny Day Real Estate, a rock band that thought playing covers was a crazy idea. Then I got into the Foo Fighters, which plays a lot of covers. It was a good six or seven years into the band before I actually let on that I wasn’t really fond of playing covers. But I think we’ve been pretty successful at doing them and making them interesting. For me, the best thing to do is to make it sound as little like the original as possible. I think our version of [Gerry Rafferty’s] “Baker Street” turned out really well.
How did Wasting Light come together?
We took a nice break before doing this record. Dave went out and recorded and toured with Them Crooked Vultures. About a year and a half ago, he was on the road and starting to think about doing the next Foo Fighters record. He sent out this manifesto email that basically said, “This is how I see this next record happening.” It had all these ideas—we’d get Butch Vig to produce it, it would be all analog, we’d do it in Dave’s garage, and we’d make a documentary film about it. From that, we had a template for what we wanted to do. Dave had most of the song ideas sorted out by last summer.
Part of recording on tape is that we would need to know the songs before we went in. In the past, we’d often come up with parts in the studio, and the songs would evolve. For this one, we did enough pre-production and rehearsal that we could have done the record live. That’s what Butch demanded, and that’s the nature of recording to tape. We started recording in September in Dave’s garage at his house and did a song a week for about 11 weeks.
You’re most often seen playing various Fender Precision Basses. Which basses did you use to record the album?
I played all of Wasting Light on a Lakland [Bob Glaub Signature]. We tried a few different basses, but we found the sound that worked best. We’d change the EQ to get the bass to fit in the mix. I love Lakland basses, and I’m using them on tour for drop-D tunings right now. But I’m a bit more comfortable playing Fender basses, so I’ve gone back to playing those for most of the set.
Aside from your basses and Ashdown rig, are you running through any effects?
I use a Fulltone overdrive pedal on one song, but I’m not using many pedals these days. Now that we have three guitar players [Grohl, Chris Shiflett, and Pat Smear], there’s a lot of distortion going on. So I try to keep it clean and stay in line with the kick drum. That way, I know that even if we’re playing a big, echo-y venue, at least the bass will come across with some bite and precision.
The album’s second single, “Rope,” has a riff that’s particularly intricate.
That song has been around for a while. Taylor [Hawkins] sometimes comes up with a rhythm on drums, and then bases a riff around that—that’s how it happened with this song. I think he had that rhythm in his head and then figured out the chords and the structure. When we first heard it, it was just Dave playing it on the guitar; then we started jamming around with it. Taylor and Dave usually work on the drum parts together. Taylor comes up with ideas, and then Dave will say, “I want to hear it like this,” or, “That’s cool what you’re doing there—try it this way,” and we just build it up from there. Since Dave’s a drummer, he has the advantage of rhythm being second nature to him. It allows him to do things that are a bit more complicated without having to think about it too much.
“I Should Have Known” is another interesting one, as it has both you and Foos guitarist Pat Smear playing bass.
Right. On the record, that’s [Nirvana’s] Krist Novoselic playing bass. Live, Pat plays his part on a double-neck Hagstrom, which is awesome. We’re playing pretty much the same part; I’m just adding some passing notes and following the drums a little, while Pat plays it straight.
Motörhead is opening up for the Foo Fighters on a bunch of live dates. Dave seems to have a close relationship with Lemmy. Are the two of you friends, as well?
I like Lemmy, but he and I aren’t exactly tight; if I were to design two people to be polar opposites, I’d probably come up with Lemmy and me. I really like his music, and I like that he walks it like he talks it. A lot of people who look like Lemmy turn out to be the sweetest people you ever meet— but Lemmy is actually kind of a badass, and I appreciate that about him. Plus, he’s got his own style of playing. He does it his own way, and I think that’s cool.
Are there any other bands you’re playing with that are particularly cool?
Right now the opening act is Biffy Clyro, a Scottish band that’s one of the most popular groups in Europe. They’re absolutely great—a creative, heavy trio that puts a lot of thought into the music.
Starbucks. Microsoft. Foo Fighters.
Is there something in the rain-inundated Seattle aquifer that infuses its homegrown organizations with superhuman powers? Say what you will about software and Frappuccinos—in the case of the Foo Fighters, world domination comes courtesy of crushingly catchy, good old fashioned red-blooded rock & roll.
Formed in 1994 by frontman Dave Grohl—who had already been anointed as a savior of rock for his role as the drummer in Nirvana—Foo Fighters made light work of its utter domination of the rock charts throughout the ’90s and ’00s, racking up Grammy Awards and selling records by the boatload.
Just as Grohl’s Nirvana pedigree no doubt unlocked doors for the band when it first formed, bassist Nate Mendel’s powerful presence brought the band a different sort of cred; after years touring the country in a variety of hardcore and indie bands, Mendel had built a reputation as the anchor of Sunny Day Real Estate, a Seattle-based band cited as being one of the first to bridge the established grunge scene with the embryonic genre that would become known as emo. With Sunny Day Real Estate, Mendel crystalized a style of playing that was both heavy-handed and fleet-footed, rooted in punk rock but prone to melodic flights that encircled the band’s airy arrangements.
Earlier this year, the Foo Fighters released Wasting Light, its seventh studio album. A few dates into a world tour that’s likely to last most through most of 2012, BASS PLAYER caught up with Mendel to talk about the genesis of his understated, unsung style.
GEAR
Basses ’71 Fender Precision Bass, Fender Custom Shop Precision Basses, Lakland Bob Glaub Signature
Studio rig Ashdown ABM-900 and Ashdown Classic 8×10 cab
Live rig Two Ashdown BTA-400 heads and two Classic 8×10 cabs
Picks Dunlop Tortex (.88mm)
Strings GHS Bass Boomers (“I just read an article that Klaus Flouride used Rotosounds on the Dead Kennedys records, so I’m going to try them to see if some of that can rub off on me!”)
Effects Fulltone Bass-Drive
Source: Bass Player