"Look, you don't have the weak, womanly fingers of the guitar princess. You, my friend, have the muscular stumps of a bass man!"
Before we get into it:
I want to frame this discussion of this list of the things that you can do in order to sound more like a bass player
with a quote from the great American sage
Ashton Kutcher:
You know how to play guitar,
and it's only natural to try and bring all the idiosyncrasies of guitar playing
to bass playing because they're so similar on a physical level.
In order to truly grow as a musician, you need to throw away those idiosyncrasies
and learn what it means to be a bass player and fit the bass playing role into your musical vocabulary.
How do you do that exactly? Well:
AH! That's so stupid! You're being racist against pick players!
*INTENSE COMMENTING* AH! AUAAHHGHGH! OUUAAUAUUAH! OUEH--
I know, I know, I know. Playing with a pick is great.
But this is much more of a psychological trick than purely a musical one.
When you play finger style, otherwise known as 'pizzicato',
it immediately forces you into a different mindset from which you are accustomed to as a guitarist.
All of the fancy patterns that you're used to playing are now a lot harder to play. Bass is foundational,
so you really want to just focus on what is strictly necessary.
When you play finger style, don't think of plucking the string; that's a little bit of a misnomer. Rather,
you should sort of think about pushing through the string, if that makes any sense,
so your finger lands on the string above it.
In classical terminology, this is known as a 'rest stroke'.
Most finger style guitar players use something called a 'free stroke' where the finger doesn't land on the string above it.
Listen carefully to the difference between rest stroke and free stroke on bass guitar:
In most circumstances, bass players prefer the sound and the feel of the rest stroke because of that thump.
Getting used to the feel of that thump and the rest stroke
will make you sound a lot more like a professional bass player.
Just one finger? I thought bass players use two fingers!
Yeah, that's true,
But this suggestion, like the previous one, is a little bit more of a psychological one.
Playing with one finger is very similar to playing with all downstrokes on guitar.
Physically limiting, yes, but it lends itself to a very particular style of playing.
This style of limited bass playing is actually fairly useful for bass players
because it makes everything sound very even and controlled.
One of the greatest bass players of all time, James Jamerson of Motown fame, only used one finger.
He called it his "hook."
And he was able to play some pretty incredibly intricate bass lines with just one finger.
Definitely check out his bass line to "For Once In My Life".
When you do decide to start messing around with two-finger technique like most bass players use,
make sure that you strictly alternate between your index finger and your middle finger.
Not all bass players do this, granted, but it can be great to have a system through which you can focus your practice.
One of the big things to get used to when you're playing bass
is that bass is a lot bigger than guitar. It has a longer scale length.
This means that stretching a full four frets with your hand can cause a lot of unnecessary stress in the lower positions. (Ow!)
Most of the time bass players adopt a three-fret stretch in the lower positions of the bass
because it more naturally accommodates the contours of the hand. This usually means that the third finger is not used.
We sometimes call this the Simandl Method after the nineteenth-century bass player who adopted this approach to double bass .
A place where this is the most obvious is octaves.
Using your third finger for an octave in the lower positions feels very awkward, and it is, quite frankly, a dead giveaway for a guitarist who has switched to bass.
Look at how much more relaxed my hand is when I play that upper octave with my fourth finger instead of my third finger.
A lot of bass playing can just be reduced to playing with the index finger and the pinky finger.
You can practice a more natural approach to bass playing fingering by taping your second third and fourth fingers together.
This really might force you out of your comfort zone, but honestly will make you sound more like a bass player.
So, so far, this list has been a bunch of tips to help you remove extraneous movement from your playing
so that you might not be tempted to play more "guitar"-based sorts of things in your bass playing.
Okay, that's great. Yeah, 'play less, play less'. Whatever. But is there anything more specific that you can give us besides, you know,
*DEEP BREATH*
"Feel the groove, man!"?
Listen, young Padawan, for now I get to the things that are really important in bass playing.
For a lot of guitarists, drums are kind of like
those loud things behind you that keep time for you when you lose your spot in the music when you're taking a long, obnoxious solo.
For bass players, a good drummer is a piece of your eternal soul.
In most situations, what your drummer does with their kick drum is your most important point of focus as a bass player.
The combination of the punch and the attack of a kick drum with the sustained nature of the bass guitar is what helps give rhythm sections
their groove. You don't necessarily have to follow the kick drum slavishly;
in fact, for certain styles of music, it might not actually be the right choice.
But the more that you do, the more locked-in you will feel. It also definitely helps to listen to what the snare drum does.
A great technique for creating that locked-in feeling is to cut off your bass notes in time with the snare backbeat.
As a guitarist, you're probably aware that
The same definitely applies to bass guitar.
Just as you might cringe when newbie metal guitarists go immediately for the smiley face EQ that cuts out all the mids, (Yeah!)
I cringe when bass players do the same.
But mids suck!
Yeah, not really though. The fundamental frequencies of all the notes on the bass guitar
generally lie between 50 Hertz and 200 Hertz on the frequency spectrum.
This is roughly the same sonic space that the kick drum occupies. This presents a little bit of a problem to us:
How do we lock into the kick drum if the frequencies clash?
Well, the fundamentals might clash, but generally speaking, we hear the first harmonics on bass guitar way more clearly than the fundamentals.
These first harmonics are an octave higher and they generally fall in between 100 Hertz and 400 Hertz.
This frequency band is generally controlled by the low mid knob on a lot of bass guitar amplifiers.
This is what you want to boost slightly if you want to be heard in the mix and also to have a strong and robust bass guitar tone.
You might even want to turn down the bass a little bit on your amplifier because some audio engineers actually do a high pass at 75 hertz
so that the frequencies from the bass guitar don't interfere with the lower frequencies from the kick drum.
...what it is that you are going to play.
This is a big one, and it's probably something you should be doing anyway if you're playing guitar,
but maybe it takes switching to bass to actually play with some purpose.
You have less notes to choose from, so you're much more exposed, and you really have to make the notes that you do play count.
In the beginning this will mean that you will play less, or should play less,
Because you will have less headspace and less experience with the bass guitar.
Eventually you will be able to hear more and more complicated lines which is fantastic,
but remember: Just because you can physically play something does not necessarily mean that it is musically appropriate,
or you will have the experience in order to place that within a musically appropriate situation.
This is why it is so easy to spot a guitarist who has just picked up bass.
They play a lot of notes with very little conviction.
(Orsini-Rosenberg): "Too many notes, Your Majesty?"
(Emperor): "Exactly. Very well put."
(Emperor): "Too many notes."
In order to play bass well, you need to be very calm, steady, and confident with your musical choices on the bass guitar.
Not the toy one.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this lesson. If you're new to my channel, this is what my lessons used to be like--
Talking a lot about bass guitar rather than general music stuff.
So I'm sorry if you aren't a bass player,
but I thought that this might be interesting anyway for people who are switching to base from guitar and other instruments
and I hope you got something out of it anyway
because I did throw in a lot of general musical knowledge and all that stuff.
So, if you like what I do, definitely, you know, leave a comment, and say, like,
"Hey, Adam I like what you do!" and leave a question because that's awesome;
I answer them in question and answer videos all the time. If you like what I do also, please,
uh,
consider joining my Patreon - these are my Patreon subscribers - uh, and get cool, like, background stuff.
I post additional content to my Patreon feed all the time.
and until next time,
*LOUD BREATH*
BASS.