Geoff Chalmers: Hi it's Geoff Chalmers here from discoverdoublebass.com.
Thanks for stopping by and checking out another of my video lessons, and if you want more
you can go and visit the lessons library over at the website and there's a whole bunch of
lessons there for you.
Okay, today I'm going to be showing you how to play the riff that you just heard.
Now this is a pattern I came up with, a groove to get my left hand back into shape.
I've recently taken a couple weeks off playing, and when I came back I was getting really
tired very quickly in the left hand.
And I'm also working on doing a series of lessons on these kind of triplet pull off
type of fills that you hear people play such as Ray Brown, Ron Carter, Eddie Gomez use.
So these sorts of-
those kind of style triplet pull offs.
So let's have a look at the groove, and I'll show you how you can use it to improve your
left hand dexterity, your hand shape, which will help your tuning, and also help you play
with greater rhythmical accuracy as well once you have these under control.
Let's check out those pull offs now.
So before we get started with the riff, we should really look at the technique for using
pull offs.
The key is that you're not just lifting the finger away from the fingerboard.
It's not that.
You're actually plucking over in this direction.
And you need quite a lot of strength to do that.
So I'm not squeezing with the thumb.
I'm just pulling the finger off in this direction.
And what I would recommend doing is, don't worry about the pitches too much, but just
practice moving between fingers one and two.
More slowly and more accurately.
And fingers two and four.
And then one, four.
When you do one and four, try to think about the whole hand coming down, not just the little
finger like this because it's harder for me to maintain a hand shape here, and just like
if you were hammering on, you would think about all the fingers going down and just
a bit of a tension in the little finger.
And people who can play quickly are often employing these hammer ons and pull offs as
well.
It really helps you get speed in your left hand.
But one of the issues is that as the fingers leave the fingerboard, you can end up with
a really odd hand shape, so the subsequent notes that you play may be out of tune.
So I would recommend practicing really slowly and see if you can maintain the same volume
and the correct tuning as you move between the different fingers.
Everyone will have a combination that they find harder.
So it might be the little finger you struggle to get as much volume as you do with your
second finger perhaps.
So you want to really even it out and zone in on the part of the exercise that you're
finding hardest.
I'd also recommend that you practice these hammer ons as well for exactly the same reason.
You could do a chromatic exercise, such as that.
Or just keep it simple in half position.
But try not to let the fingers go miles away and completely lose the hand shape.
But you'll be able to use this to get a lot of these cool triplet fills.
Now, the example riff.
Let's get into the details there and I can show you what I was playing.
Now, I was thinking about basically a groove in G dominant 7 because that was the key I
was practicing the fills in.
And it starts actually with a hammer on, and then a kind of fill going down towards home
base, which is this low G here.
Let's have a look at that slowly.
B flat to B, and I'm using the neck heel to find that bluesy sound.
Find that position, that note, the B flat.
So I put my hand on the neck heel, and if I'm doing things correctly, and I've got a
D neck stop, I don't want to go too much detail here.
If you're not sure, check out my lesson about using the neck heel, which I'll provide a
link for.
But if you've got a D stop neck heel, and you put your fingers down, you should have
A, A sharp, B, B-flat.
If you'd prefer to call it B-flat.
So I'm going B-flat, B. So it's B-flat, B, D, F, E, D.
And there's also a muted ghost note just before I land on the D. Slowly, B-flat, B, D, F,
down to the E, sliding, a muted note, D, and then B-flat to B again, and D, and then the
open strings leading down to the G. Okay.
And then the pattern starts with two Gs, low G, and
this is where we get into the triplets.
So we're playing B-flat, and it's B-flat, G, and then there's a ghost note,
on the note, on the D string, but you don't actually play it.
You've got this ghost note here, and then G, F, D. B flat, G, ghost note, G, F, D. Let's
do that again from the beginning.
And I'm also putting in a ghost note just before the high G, so G- sorry, just before
the B-flat.
Ghost note, then the pattern.
So there the pattern moves up to a C, G, but it's B natural this time.
G, B natural, G. And again it's the same pattern.
There's a little ghost note, G, F, D. Okay, go from the beginning of the riff.
And the only difference now is that I start on the third on the B to the G. B, G, C, G,
B, G, B-flat pattern, C, G, B natural pattern.
And this is basically what I was practicing to sort of bring my hand shape up to speed
and develop that rhythmical accuracy that I was looking for.
So I'd really encourage you to practice that slowly.
And it's a tough thing to do, to get the tempo and the rhythm really accurate with that.
With these pull offs, often people can kind of lose a bit of control, and the triplets
don't really sound accurately.
You've got to be really tacketa [SP], tacketa, tacketa, tacketa, tacketa, tacketa.
Second time round, I do a little fill.
That's F, F-sharp, open G, F-sharp, G, and then open G. And you've really got to have
your tuning together because you need to be landing on this G on the D string here.
Then that's the pattern.
Same pattern again.
Now there's one more fill I played, which was . . . And here I went.
. . I was playing a pentatonic kind of line.
B-flat, B, D, E, G, B, G. And just before the G harmonic with the thumb, I'm playing
a ghost note.
Can you hear that?
And then sliding up to that B. So let's go from that fill.
And on the way back down, there's a ghost note before the D. B-flat, D, B-flat, B natural,
D, D, open D, A, C, G. Let's do from the beginning of the fill.
Then it's C, G, and then at last, almost at the end of it now, I just did a little A to
B-flat, B-flat to B. Can you hear the ghost notes?
And to finish off with I did this really cheesy ending, down a sort of dominant 7th scale,
with an extra note thrown in.
So we're going G, G, F, E, here's the extra note, D-sharp, D. And then I think I played
something like- so hammer on, D, open D, open A, G, then the B at the end.
Let's do that one more time from the beginning.
You can maybe put the third in there at the top.
Just add a bit of spice at the end.
So the main thing is that you work on these triplets, and you could just work on the main
groove, over and over again.
Sorry, can't speak and play at the same time.
Over and over again, repeat it, get really comfortable with that groove.
And then maybe once you've got a bit further into it, you can pick apart the fills that
I've just shown you, or you could add in ones of your own as well.
But having these little rhythmic patterns, it will really help you fine tune what's going
on with these triplet fills that you might be adding into your walking baselines.
And keep an eye out for some lessons on that topic which I'll be covering in future.
Well, I hope you've enjoyed the lesson today, and if you have and you're watching on YouTube,
and you can see a thumbs up, give it a press, give me a like, and that will encourage me
to do more of these, and help us share the lessons with new people.
Keep practicing hard.
If you want some more video lessons, you can visit www.discoverdoublebase.com