Bass Nation

Mike Watt is another favorite of mine. Many people refer to him as a pioneering punk rock bassist. While the Minutemen were part of the Southern California punk rock scene and they were on SST records, I think their music went far beyond punk. While they had the aggression and angst of punk rock, they were probably closer musically to jazz. After their guitarist died, Mike and their drummer started fIREHOSE, which also really pushed the musical boundaries of punk rock. He has since put out a couple of great solo albums and tours all the time.

I’ve had the opportunity to see Mike play at the same small club twice within a 2 week period in the fall of 2000. First it was his own show, and then two weeks later he was playing bass for J. Mascis.

There are plenty of videos of him on YouTube, many better looking than these, but this is an improvisational jam with Mike and Money Mark (Beastie Boys’ keyboardist). Rest of the parts after the jump.

Sometime in the early 90s, a band called Primus came out of the San Francisco bay area into an overly crowded scene of emerging “alternative” rock. It was an easy scene for lesser bands to get lost in, but there was something about Primus that set them far apart. That something is Les Claypool’s ridiculous bass playing. His style is something of a hybrid between Tony Levin and Stanley Clarke which is not something you’d expect to hear in alt rock, and it’s his bass that is the front and center of their songs, another thing you don’t expect from alt rock. Sure, Red Hot Chili Peppers have Flea, but Les took it to an even higher level. Rumor has it that when Metallica were looking for a new bassist after Cliff Burton died, Les auditioned and they turned him down because he was too good. Here’s a very early video of Primus playing To Defy The Laws of Tradition in a college radio station.

Pentatonic scales are probably the first scale most bassists learn. This is one you need to know in and out and how to play them in any key. Why? Because they’re freakin’ versatile! You can play them under almost anything, major or minor. Otherwise known as the blues scale, the pentatonic has 5 notes rather than the usual 7 in major and minor scales. And once you learn the patterns, you have all sorts of improvisational options.

Here’s a more in-depth explanation with notation and tabs.

Here’s a video lesson with pro bassist Scott Giambusso.

Remember, the key to learning these scales is repetition. Do it until long after it’s boring. Drill it into your brain so your fingers can do it without even thinking about it. Once you’ve gotten to the point where you can do them forewards and backwards in your sleep, start mixing them up and jumping around with them.

Larry Graham is probably best known as Sly and the Family Stone’s bassist, though he’s played with lots of others and has had a successful solo career. In this video, he discusses the interaction between bass and guitar.

Sometimes less is more. Sure, you’ve practiced like crazy and want to be all over the place all the time, but sometimes you need to pull back a bit, and that’s not always easy to do. You can’t shred all the time. Even Jaco has a few songs where he just gets into a repetative simple groove that drives the song. That said, there are some genres of music where this doesn’t apply as much. But even in progressive rock and progressive metal, there are times to just break it down and play a bit more sparsely. It’s really easy to get into musical masturbation. But that’s usually a lot more fun for the people playing than the people listening.

Here’s another song that I find to be good for exercising your fingers and for giving you ideas about where you can go on the neck. It’s Heart of the Sunrise by Yes. It’s really fast and it’s all over the place on the neck. Chris Squire plays it with a pick, though you’ll get more out of it by playing with your fingers.

Remember, when trying to learn a new song, play each part slowly until you can build up the speed, and then try putting it all together. This is another one that I’ve been messing around with for months and only have some of the parts really down. If you’re a beginning, don’t let it discourage you. Here’s the tab and here’s the album version on YouTube without any video distraction.

Another thing that I have found really helpful is trying to find a YouTube video of somebody playing it. Don’t look for the original because they’ll be competing for screen time with the rest of their band. But there are lots of people who will stick their camera on a tripod and just play the song so you can see their fingering and it’s a great way to learn.

Have fun with this one!

How could there possibly be a blog about the bass without mentioning the man himself, Jaco Pastorius? He’s pretty much regarded as the greatest electric bass guitarist who has ever lived. After switching from drums due to a sports injury, he picked up and upright bass which completely fell apart due to Florida’s humidity. Sop he picked up a ‘62 Fender Jazz Bass, pried out the frets with a butter knife, filled the grooves with putty and put a coating on the neck. This was his “Bass of Doom,” pictured at the right and also on the header image of this very blog.

What set Jaco apart from the rest was his approach to playing bass. While holding down a driving rhythm is important, he also focused on melody. Many of his bass lines were inspired by bebop horn runs.The very first track on his first solo album is a Charlie Parker song with him just blazing the leads.

He had an amazing solo career, played with fusion supergroup Weather Report, did lots of studio work with a wide variety of artists and even recorded an instructional video. And then his all too brief life was cut short when he drunkenly got thrown out of a Santana concert after trying to get up on stage and a fight with a bouncer led to brain damage that killed him at the age of 35.

Check out his wikipedia entry here for more details on his life, his technique, his gear and more. Below is a video of Jaco with Weather Report doing Teen Town. More videos after the jump.

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Tony Levin is one of my absolute favorite bassists. You’ve heard him as a session musician on a million different things probably without even knowing it. I recently found out that it was him playing bass on Alice Cooper’s Welcome to my Nightmare album. When Peter Gabriel left Genesis to go solo, Tony joined his band. During those recording sessions, he met Robert Fripp who invited him to join the 80’s incarnation of King Crimson. Probably the first thing I ever heard Tony’s playing was the tapping intro to Elephant Talk on Crimson’s Discipline album. It sounded like Primus, ten years before there was a Primus. When Yes split up, Tony was the bassist for Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe. He’s also an amazing solo artist. Tony is an incredibly versatile musician, constantly pushing the envelope of what can be done with a bass. He invented the Funk Fingers, which attaches drumstick tips to your fingers to strike the bass strings more percussively.

Besides bass guitar and electric upright, he also plays the Chapman Stick which for lack of a better description is like a combination of a bass, guitar and piano, all on one wide neck with a ton of strings. I just found an album that he did with a percussionist and a woodwind player where they played some improvisational mood music in a cave, using the cave’s unusual acoustics for a haunting effect.

There are tons of great examples I could show of Tony’s playing. Here he is playing Heart of the Sunrise using the funk fingers with the California Guitar Trio and Jon Anderson. More videos after the jump

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…an NS Design Wav 4 Electric Upright Bass ! Just look at this thing. Isn’t it beautiful? I’ve been interested in playing electric upright for years. Back when I was living in DC, I went to Atomic Music with some friends of mine right before Christmas and I saw an electric upright. I don’t even know what brand it was, but I tried it out and immediately realized that I had to have it. So my plan was to come back right after Christmas and put a down payment on it with Christmas money. I guess everyone else had the same idea because that sucker was gone.  What I probably should have done was picked up a fretless electric, but instead I got an acoustic so that I could jam with my friends and their acoustic guitars.

Jump ahead 6 or 7 years to the present. I was at a new Trader Joe’s with my wife and daughter and I saw that there was a music store right next door. I went in and what was the first thing I saw but a Palatino Electric Upright . I played it briefly and loved it, and found it to be very affordable online. Though as I read more reviews, I saw that there were some issues with it.

Then I started looking at the NS Designs Wav 4. It looks incredibly slick, and it’s an affordable version of their much higher end instruments. Since I had played the Palatino, I really wanted to play one of these just to see if it felt right, and a month or so later I had the opportunity. A friend of mine had gone to a jam at a recording studio where they had one of the higher end models and brought me along the following week to give it a try. It was the 5 string bass cello. The difference, besides several thousand dollars in price, is lots of active electronics and a neck length and scale the same as an electric bass guitar. I got on it and just started grooving like nobody’s business. It was amazing. I felt like my playing was just set free. I had no trouble at all with the extra string, the rounded neck and the upright position.

Unlike the Palatino, the NS Design basses have fret markers to help transition between a standard fretted bass guitar. It also has less body to make it easier to hit the higher register. And while the Palatino tries to emulate a big bass fiddle in look, this looks like something completely different.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my boss got me a Wav 4 as my Christmas bonus this year. He’d been asking me what I wanted and I’ve been talking about this thing for a while. We’ll just see.

If Bootsy Collins isn’t the funkiest bassist out there, he’s definitely the flashiest. He got his start playing with James Brown, and like so many people who have played with the hardest working man in show business, he quit and then hooked up with George Clinton. Apparently James Brown is not the easiest guy to work for. No matter what kind of music you’re into and whether you know it or not, you have heard this guy’s basslines. Besides being in a ton of classic tunes, he’s been sampled a zillion times so he’s all over hiphop too. He even showed up as a member of the early 90’s dance music group Dee-lite, exposing his grooves to a whole new audience. Bass, more than any other instrument, drives funk. Without bass, there is no funk. And in this short video clip, Bootsy explains his simple formula for keeping it funky.

Stanley Clarke is mostly know for playing electric bass guitar, first as bassist for Chick Corea’s fusion band Return to Forever and then as a solo artist. I first heard of him when he did the score for the film Higher Learning, and then shortly thereafter I had a chance to see him live at a street festival in DC. I loved that he had another bass player laying down traditional bass lines and he was up front playing his bass as a lead instrument. This guy plays almost like a guitarist and with lots of soul. When I started taking my playing more seriously recently, I got a bunch of his albums and they are just amazing, from tripped out and psychedelic to hard funk to more traditional jazz, even to disco. The disco stuff is sure not my favorite, but it’s some of the best performed disco you’re going to find. While there are lots of examples of his electric playing on YouTube, there’s one from a jazz festival of him playing a sick solo on an upright bass.