Hello and welcome to Bass Tone Playing Technique with me Nick Long brought to you by Easy Ear
Training. Last time around we looked at the construction and features of the bass guitar
and how this influences tone and this time we’re going to be moving on from that and looking at
how electric bass guitar technique can influence tone. When the electric bass guitar first became
popular bass players who’d migrated from the double bass continued to play with their fingers
as they always had using the walking technique but former guitarists favoured the plectrum.
Finger style bass is typically played by alternately plucking the strings with the flesh of the index
and second fingers. This isn’t like Spanish guitar where you play with your fingernails. This is
sometimes called a walking bass technique because the fingers look like two legs walking along.
For this example I’m going to play an A major scale using finger style walking bass.
Pick bass is usually favoured by rock players who need to sustain long passages of even notes at a
very high tempo and this can be very tiring when you play at finger style. The slight click of a
plastic pick also adds articulation to distorted bass lines and ensures that the notes stay distinct.
Some players prefer to play with the fingers but like the aggression of the pick. Bass players tend
to use much thicker, stiffer plectrums than guitarists. The big thick strings of the bass take a lot of
picking so you don’t want some weedy bit of plastic flapping around like our guitar playing friends.
I favour a Jim Dunlop Big Stubby for pick bass duties. In this example I’m going to use some fast
picking patterns which would be hard to play accurately with the fingers.
Plucking with the fingers or a plectrum isn’t the only way to play a bass. In the late 1960s Larry
Graham who later went on to find famous part of Sly and the Family Stone devised a new way of playing
the bass. He was trying to emulate the kick and snare of a drummer when he was playing on his own.
First he’d strike the string with the bone of his thumb joint to make it bounce off the frets like
this. And then he’d pull a string off the fretboard allowing it to snap back down like this.
The technique became known as slap bass and it became an integral part of funk and unfortunately
an infamous part of rock. One of the most common things people play with slap bass are octaves.
Let’s hear some octaves played as slaps and pops.
Let’s hear the slap sound across the four strings of the bass.
As you can hear it can be difficult to get a convincing slap sound on the G string and that’s
why slapping tends to happen more on the E and A strings.
Now let’s hear the pop sound across the four strings of the bass. I’ll be pulling the strings off the
fretboard and allowing them to slap back down.
One of the advantages of the slap style is that as the hand moves up and down it’s easy to play a slap
on every downstroke and a pop on every upstroke. This means that with the slap style you can play
notes extremely rapidly. When slapping it’s also possible to bounce a thumb joint off the string
in the same way that a drummer plays a snare roll creating a double note. This means that with slap
bass it’s possible to play some very very fast percussive sounding riffs. Let’s demonstrate that now.
In this example a funk octave riff is played fingerstyle and then using slap techniques and hammer-ons.
In slap style playing the bass lines often structured like a drum pattern with the slap taking the place
of the bass drum and the pop taking the place of the snare. The alternating slap and pop on the up and down
stroke of the hand allows slap players to achieve impressively rapid passages of notes especially
when combined with hammer-ons. If you take a look at the waveform of the slap bass riff that you’ve
recorded you’ll notice it has a lot of sharp peaks like a drum track. The slap bass technique is a lot
louder than regular fingerstyle so you’ll want to invest in a compressor pedal if you want to combine
the two during a performance. I’m going to talk more about bass compressors in a later feature so look out for that.
If you want to hear more slap bass and why wouldn’t you? Good starting point to the Red Hot Chilli
Peppers, Primus, Level 42 or Sly and the Family Stone. Slap bass is all about the right hand getting
funky but what about when the left hand wants to get in on the action? If you want a fast flurry of
notes but your fingers can’t keep up or if you need a super smooth sound without all the attack of the
notes then what you need to do is legato. Legato is another one of these strange classical music terms which
means tied together but to bass players it’s essentially the combination of two techniques
the hammer on and the pull off which are known collectively as slurs. When you play a pull off
you remove the finger fretting the sounding note so a lower pitch note sounds. The finger whips down
sharply so the note continues to ring out. Here’s an example of a pull off.
Here’s an example pulling off from the second fret to an open string on each string in turn E A D G.
In this example I’ll play a riff first sounding every note and then using pull offs.
Now with pull offs.
The companion technique to a pull off is the hammer on which is often just called a hammer and this
involves using the finger of the left hand like a hammer to pound down onto the string so it sounds
without being plucked. Let’s try hammering on from an open string to the second fret on each string in
turn E A D G.
Here I’m going to play a riff first sounding every note and then using hammers.
If you combine a string of hammer ons and pull off it creates what’s called a trill which is a rapid
fluctuation between two notes. Maintaining a fast trill takes a lot of stamina. Let’s try a trill from
an open string to the second fret on each of the strings in turn E A D G.
Let’s try a riff using trills.
You can play a hammer on when a note’s already sounding like this or you can play one from
silence like this and that’s called a hammer on from nowhere or sometimes a left hand tap.
Now I imagine the smart ones among you will be thinking a left hand tap? Does that mean there’s
such a thing as a right hand tap? Well that’s a good question imaginary smart listener. The right
hand can also be used to tap onto notes. Here’s an example of a hammer on from nowhere or tap played
with the right hand. If you alternate left and right hand tapping it can create rapid passages of notes
where you can create really interesting things like Bach style arpeggios. Let’s take a listen to
something like that now. The technique will be familiar to any fans of Van Halen’s guitar playing
as he uses it to play ridiculously fast solos on tracks like Eruption but it does also have a
place on the bass. Right hand taps in conjunction with legato techniques can create some cool funky
riffs or patterns that sound like a sequenced synth bass.
One of the most fun things you can do on the bass is slide between notes which is also called a gliss.
Play a note and then move the fretting finger to another note without releasing the pressure.
You can hear this technique on the iconic intro to London Calling by The Clash. Let’s play some slides.
Let’s play a riff using a lot of slides.
Slides work brilliantly as intros or links between parts of songs. The bass player Gene Simmons of Kiss
is a big fan of slides and uses them at every opportunity. In this example I’m going to slide
down into a riff and then use a slide between each riff to add a bit of interest.
The sound of a slide is an instant way to hear whether an electric bass is fretted. A slide on
electric bass reminds me of the Jerry Lee Lewis piano technique of running your fingers all the
way down the keys. Note though that on a piano running down all the white notes will sound the
notes of a C major scale while on a bass it will be strictly chromatic. Once you’ve mastered slides and
slurs you can mix them all together to add interest to your riffs and runs. In this example I’m going
to start off by sounding every note as usual and then I’m going to change to add slides hammers and
pull-offs to add a bit of interest. See if you can identify which techniques he used where.
That’s all for this time around, I hope you had fun learning how bass technique influences tone.
Next time around we’re going to be looking at bass amplifiers and answering some important
questions like what do all the knobs do, do they have to be so darn big and can I get them to go
loud enough to drown out my guitarist’s solos. All that and more in the next part.
