Dec 27 2008
Larry Graham on Band Dymanics
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.
