Hello and welcome to Bass Tone with me, Nick Long.
It punches you in the chest and flaps your trouser legs. It’s the thump that moves the rump.
A bass player forms a connective tissue between the drummer and the rest of the instruments,
standing with one foot in the rhythmic and the other in the melodic.
It’s sometimes said that the drummer makes you tap your feet but the bass player makes you leave your seat.
In fact, a killer bass sound is essential to popular music.
Now I’m not just saying this because I’m a bass player.
Time yourself five minutes and think of as many songs as you can that made it into the charts that don’t have a prominent bass line.
Could you think of one? When Doves Cry by Prince is the only one that I got.
In this series, we’re going to explore the wide variety of tones which can be produced by the bass family of instruments.
From London Calling to Hysteria to Car Wash, there are a huge number of tracks that rely on a unique bass sound for a killer hook.
This series is a little different to most of the bass articles that you’ll have read in the past because I’m focusing on tone rather than technique.
In other words, I’m going to be talking about the sounds that the bass can make rather than just how to play the examples that you hear.
I expect these articles will be of most interest to intermediate bass players wanting to open up their sonic palette and explore new sounds, and guitarists considering switching to bass.
But I also hope players of other instruments, and especially non-musicians, are going to get a kick out of these articles too.
By talking about the sounds of the bass, I want to encourage active listening, allowing you to pull apart music with your ears, unweave the rainbow and hear the hole in a new light.
These examples are presented without any accompaniment so you can just focus on the sound of the bass.
But next time you listen to one of your favourite tracks, turn your ears towards the bass line and see what new things you can discover.
Bass is popularly perceived as being the instrument for the bloke who looks cool but can’t really play.
Think Sid Vicious or Stuart Sutcliffe and the early Beatles.
And for a number of popular bands, this is probably true.
But it need not be this way.
I once had an audition for a band where the guitarist sent me an email the day before saying
We really need someone who understands that the job of a bass player is just to play root notes on the beat.
Needless to say, I took a rain check.
Now it’s true to say, the job of bass man is not one for the glory hunter.
But with good ears and musicality, the bass player can make a good band great.
Before we go any further, I want to talk about listening to the examples.
Laptop speakers often have trouble accurately reproducing bass frequencies.
So if you’re listening on a laptop, try and use headphones or hook up some speakers.
If you want some advice on audio equipment for ear training examples,
you can try my earlier series, Wired for Sound, which is available on easyeartraining.com.
We’re going to start by getting to know the upright bass.
The upright is the daddy of all basses, usually known as string or double bass in orchestral circles.
You can think of it as like a giant violin and the construction is very similar.
The upright bass is tuned in fourths, E, A, D, G, like the lowest four strings of a guitar, but an octave lower.
This kind of makes it the odd man out in the orchestra string section where most instruments are tuned in fifths.
The string bass is a pretty versatile instrument.
You’ve probably seen it played by orchestral musicians with a bow like a violin to produce a sustained note.
Now you can really impress your classically trained friends by calling this technique arco.
Let’s take a listen to an upright bass now.
In this clip, the bass is going to play every string in turn using the arco technique.
And here’s a dark and sonorous phrase played with the arco technique.
The arco technique isn’t the only way to play an acoustic bass.
In jazz and most styles outside of classical music, the instrument is usually plucked with the finger.
This is called pizzicato classical terminology fans.
Let’s listen to each string in turn, this time played pizzicato.
And a phrase played pizzicato style.
In rockabilly and bluegrass, the bass is often played with a slap style.
Now don’t confuse this with the electric bass slap that you may have heard someone like Mark King or Flea using in a Red Hot Chili Peppers song.
We’ll be talking about that later.
In upright bass slap, the strings are pulled back very aggressively so they slap against the fingerboard.
And this creates a kind of percussive thump sound.
This is really effective if you’re in a group without a drummer as it adds a rhythmic sound that would be lacking otherwise.
One of my favourite bands with an upright bass is the western swing group The Hot Club of Cowtown.
They feature some ridiculously great bass playing and there’s loads of clips of them on YouTube so check them out.
A really easy way to hear the difference between an upright and an electric bass, listen for gliss notes, where a note is played and the finger slides up to the next note.
On an upright you’ll hear that they move smoothly like a violin or on a trombone.
On an electric bass they move in semitones which is a bit like sliding your finger along the keys of a piano.
In this sample, listen to the way that the notes slide smoothly from one to the next.
Don’t think that just because the upright bass has been around for a few hundred years, it doesn’t have a place at the cutting edge.
Upright bass is a frequent ingredient in drum and bass and the jazz influence breaks of labels like Ninja Tune.
If you’re interested in hearing upright bass in a modern context, check out a group like Ronnie Sizes Represent.
The song brown paper bag features some fantastic upright bass.
There’s no doubt the upright bass is a wonderful thing.
The sheer size and physicality of the instrument is something everyone should experience.
And the powerful vibrations flowing through the instrument give you a wonderful sense of connection to the music.
Not to mention that spinning a double bass on its end pin whilst playing is one of the most fun things you can do with your clothes on.
Compared to the instruments you might find in a rock band, they can be very expensive.
An acquaintance of mine who played bass in an orchestra once told me she’d totalled her car in an accident, but it was okay because her bass was unharmed.
When I queried this, she pointed out that her car was worth less than £1,000, but the bass was valued at well over £10,000.
Not everyone can find the room or money for an acoustic bass, and many musicians just play student-sized three-quarter instruments, which also avoids the cramp-inducing 42-inch scale length.
For those of you who aren’t too familiar with scale length, a short scale length bass might be only 30 inches, so you can see that’s a pretty big jump.
Prior to the 1950s, the upright bass was the only game in town, but it was far from an ideal instrument for the working musician.
Upright basses sound fantastic, but they’re big, they’re heavy, they’re fragile, they’re expensive, and they’re not especially loud.
If you’ve ever seen a full orchestra, you’ll notice they have more than one upright bass player.
This isn’t usually because they’re playing different parts, it’s because you need several playing in unison just to be heard.
Perhaps worst of all for the upright bass in pop music, the lack of frets means it requires an almost virtuoso level of ability to play a rapid passage with a clean tone and perfect intonation.
So you can see that times were tough for bass players at the start of the 50s, but then along came a man named Leo Fender and turned all that on its head.
And that’s what we’ll be talking about next, when we discuss the electric bass.
That’s it for the upright bass, but I hope you can join me for the next part of bass tone.
