Hi there guys, this is Ben Jones from the Institute here as part of the Bass Expo for
Music Radar. We've had a little look at exercises for warm ups and also creating some interesting
lines as well using those. The next thing I want to talk to you about is an issue that
a lot of bass players have and they don't address it very often and it really does come
up in their playing later on and if you can address it early when you're a beginner or
you've only been playing for a short period of time it will really help you as you develop
into a player. And that's the idea of muting. So what is muting? Well muting is basically
where you stop one string ringing underneath another. If you hear this...it's a pretty
horrible sound. Now if I wanted to play for example an open G string, followed by an open
D string. I don't want to hear, that, I don't want to hear them ringing together even though
that actually sounds ok that's not the idea. So what we're going to look at is ways, and
it can come in 2 parts, you can mute with your left and you can mute with your right.
It's easier to mute with your left but we're going discuss some techniques for the right
hand that will hopefully help you at home. So we're going to take a very simple line,
we're going to play; 2nd fret on the D string, up to 4th fret on the G string. It's going
to go. Ok? Just a really simple. We're going to move that up 2 frets to 4th and then the
next note will be the 6th, above that. So it's going to go. Now, what we don't want
to hear is this. Hopefully you guys can hear that at home, those 2 strings are ringing
together. So let's address the left hand muting first. The great thing about playing a string
instrument is that obviously as soon as you touch this string it's vibrating at the moment
you kill the sound completely and what we're going to do is we're going to focus on the
ability to play a note release the pressure ie by letting the finger off and then
you can't get a note anymore. So if I was just playing a simple sort of...8th note pattern
I can mute and stop the note just by taking my finger off, obviously you don't want that
dead note in there but the principle is still the same, you get the note and then lose it
by releasing the pressure. 1st note is 1st finger on the 2nd fret of the D string. Then
we're going to reach up for that 4th fret with our, probably our little finger on the
G string. So, we play that note, we then release the pressure, play the next note, release
the little finger this time and then play the 1st note again. So you get...and hopefully
there you can see the pressure actually in my hand changing. And then up, and then back.
Ok, so that's the left hand and that can obviously can be put through any shape, it doesn't really
matter. What we're looking to do though is release the pressure off the fingers just
like that, now of course if you go, hopefully you all heard that. You hear what's called
a pull off, which basically means I'm actually getting that note which is an open D, we don't
want that, that will start to bleed into lines and it's not going to help you, so just taking
it off just enough so the string stops moving, is an effective way of muting, ok? Now lets
talk about the right hand, because right hand muting is very very important. Obviously we're
just concerned with these 2 strings here; D and G, the E and the A for now in this exercise
aren't going to be used. So what I'm going to do is we hit the 1st finger, the 2nd finger,
this is still vibrating, even though it's, hopefully you can see that there and then
when I play this next one, my 2nd finger, I land on the D string and because of that
it stops this note from ringing out any longer so you get... But this can't ring anymore
because my finger has already landed on it and that way we don't get this bleeding effect.
So it's a really effective use of 2 hands to make a much cleaner sound and especially
if any of you are going to be doing any recording in the future muting is a huge issue you don't
want to have all this noise going on in the background when you're recording on things.
So it's a really important thing for you to do and just remember the 2 ideas that we've
used, pressure being taking off the strings, with your fretting hand or your left hand,
or, depending on if you're a right or left handed. Then pulling through to land on the
string below in your plucking hand and those 2 should give you a much cleaner tone that
will help you in any style of music that you want to play.