Let's talk about bass techniques!
Posted: Thu Aug 22, 2019 7:58 am
Figured I'd change the pace a bit, as I've actually been more of bass player than a guitar player lately, and have been exploring new techniques. Funnily enough, as mentioned in the "other forums" discussion, the biggest bass forum seems to be heavily biased toward cover band bassists, and less on original music.
So, who here plays bass, and what techniques do you use to help you achieve your goals?
I'll start by going into some of the things I've been exploring.
1) Getting flatwound tone from a bass with roundwounds.
I play acoustic and classical guitar, and am not willing to cut my nails short - they're not super long, but they're integral to my technique and tone on those instruments, and I don't play "enough" songs that call for that thick, thuddy flatwound tone to have a dedicated bass with flats. What I found is that playing with my bass nearly vertical, I can use an acoustic bass technique, striking the string with the side of my finger. This severely tempers the string attack, and avoids my nails, which give my "typical bass fingerstyle" tone a sharper, almost pick-like attack.
Of course, I couple this with rolling down the treble on the bass and my amp. The net result is a thick, thuddy attack that actually works great for motown-style licks, accompanying acoustic instruments, etc - the type of stuff you would often want to try playing with flatwounds.
2) Finding ways to incorporate polyphony into bass parts
This is actually the bread and butter of what got me heavily into bass. I will admit that for a long time, I treated the bass like an instrument that was meant to play one note at a time, maybe some octaves or fifths in the right circumstances, but seeing ABS IV, the bassist from Pinback, playing live for the first time a couple years ago made me realize how many ways he was weaving in and out of the guitar parts.
There weren't a lot of videos showing his techniques up close, so until I got to see him live, I had no idea what he was actually doing. I was front row right beneath him, and basically spent the entire show taking mental notes of stuff to try out.
Here is a recent video where you can really see how he keeps the arpeggios going - at first, he's just using his thumb and fingers like you might expect, but then he starts fretting notes with his right index finger way up the neck, arpeggiating the low notes with his thumb, and flicking the back of his ring finger on the 1st string to play that high note independently of the left hand/thumb part which is arpeggiating way down the neck.
So, this sent me down a rabbit hole. I got a Bass VI and a shortscale 4-string and started seeing what I could get away with in terms of polyphonic "guitar"-like parts while maintaining the fundamental notes of typical basslines.
2a) Bass VI.
I found the Bass VI lent itself to certain types of techniques, mostly guitar-like chording with right hand techniques similar to my fingerstyle acoustic guitar technique. I even sometimes use a thumbpick to emphasize the bass notes on the 4th-6th strings while playing higher strings with my index, middle, and ring fingers, acoustic-style. The key with this is to keep chord voicings simpler and more sparse than I do on acoustic - inserting thirds, fourths, or fifths in the lower registers quickly turns things to mud, but using a fundamental (or single note of an inversion) and then skipping a string or two before adding more voices tends to work much better.
The string spacing prevented me from getting too fancy with right hand techniques, so I started exploring that on a shortscale 4-string...
2b) 4-string.
On 4-string, I've been throwing in two-handed tapping (sparsely!), triads (4-2-1, or 3-2-1 in terms of the strings), and stealing some of ABS IV's strumming/multitasking tricks like the "fret with right index, pluck with right ring finger, arpeggiate bassline with right thumb and left hand" thing.
2c) "regular" 6-string - with a capo!
So, I had started searching for a shortscale 6-string to tune like a Bass VI, but give me room to explore the more "bass-like" techniques I was developing on 4-string. The thing is, they were all north of $2k, so before trying to work that into the instrument budget, I decided to perform an experiment. I got a used LTD B-206 super cheap (35" scale, 2" nut) and a pair of capos. I basically tuned it B-B as a Bass VI down a fourth, and capoed it at the 5th fret - the result is a 26.22" scale Bass VI with ultrawide "nut" and string spacing!
I'm still getting to know it, and it's definitely heavier (and more neck-heavy) than it "needs" to be, but it's definitely an entirely different animal from my Bass VI. I can do all of the "bassy" techniques on it that are too cramped on the VI.
So, who here plays bass, and what techniques do you use to help you achieve your goals?
I'll start by going into some of the things I've been exploring.
1) Getting flatwound tone from a bass with roundwounds.
I play acoustic and classical guitar, and am not willing to cut my nails short - they're not super long, but they're integral to my technique and tone on those instruments, and I don't play "enough" songs that call for that thick, thuddy flatwound tone to have a dedicated bass with flats. What I found is that playing with my bass nearly vertical, I can use an acoustic bass technique, striking the string with the side of my finger. This severely tempers the string attack, and avoids my nails, which give my "typical bass fingerstyle" tone a sharper, almost pick-like attack.
Of course, I couple this with rolling down the treble on the bass and my amp. The net result is a thick, thuddy attack that actually works great for motown-style licks, accompanying acoustic instruments, etc - the type of stuff you would often want to try playing with flatwounds.
2) Finding ways to incorporate polyphony into bass parts
This is actually the bread and butter of what got me heavily into bass. I will admit that for a long time, I treated the bass like an instrument that was meant to play one note at a time, maybe some octaves or fifths in the right circumstances, but seeing ABS IV, the bassist from Pinback, playing live for the first time a couple years ago made me realize how many ways he was weaving in and out of the guitar parts.
There weren't a lot of videos showing his techniques up close, so until I got to see him live, I had no idea what he was actually doing. I was front row right beneath him, and basically spent the entire show taking mental notes of stuff to try out.
Here is a recent video where you can really see how he keeps the arpeggios going - at first, he's just using his thumb and fingers like you might expect, but then he starts fretting notes with his right index finger way up the neck, arpeggiating the low notes with his thumb, and flicking the back of his ring finger on the 1st string to play that high note independently of the left hand/thumb part which is arpeggiating way down the neck.
So, this sent me down a rabbit hole. I got a Bass VI and a shortscale 4-string and started seeing what I could get away with in terms of polyphonic "guitar"-like parts while maintaining the fundamental notes of typical basslines.
2a) Bass VI.
I found the Bass VI lent itself to certain types of techniques, mostly guitar-like chording with right hand techniques similar to my fingerstyle acoustic guitar technique. I even sometimes use a thumbpick to emphasize the bass notes on the 4th-6th strings while playing higher strings with my index, middle, and ring fingers, acoustic-style. The key with this is to keep chord voicings simpler and more sparse than I do on acoustic - inserting thirds, fourths, or fifths in the lower registers quickly turns things to mud, but using a fundamental (or single note of an inversion) and then skipping a string or two before adding more voices tends to work much better.
The string spacing prevented me from getting too fancy with right hand techniques, so I started exploring that on a shortscale 4-string...
2b) 4-string.
On 4-string, I've been throwing in two-handed tapping (sparsely!), triads (4-2-1, or 3-2-1 in terms of the strings), and stealing some of ABS IV's strumming/multitasking tricks like the "fret with right index, pluck with right ring finger, arpeggiate bassline with right thumb and left hand" thing.
2c) "regular" 6-string - with a capo!
So, I had started searching for a shortscale 6-string to tune like a Bass VI, but give me room to explore the more "bass-like" techniques I was developing on 4-string. The thing is, they were all north of $2k, so before trying to work that into the instrument budget, I decided to perform an experiment. I got a used LTD B-206 super cheap (35" scale, 2" nut) and a pair of capos. I basically tuned it B-B as a Bass VI down a fourth, and capoed it at the 5th fret - the result is a 26.22" scale Bass VI with ultrawide "nut" and string spacing!
I'm still getting to know it, and it's definitely heavier (and more neck-heavy) than it "needs" to be, but it's definitely an entirely different animal from my Bass VI. I can do all of the "bassy" techniques on it that are too cramped on the VI.